Redirect Chain
A sequence of two or more redirects between the URL requested and the page that finally answers.
What it means
Request a URL, get a 301 to a second URL, which 301s to a third, which finally returns the page. Each hop costs time and a little crawl budget, and long chains are usually the fossil record of several migrations stacked on top of each other.
The part a short definition leaves out
One hop is normal and often correct, like http to https. Three or four means nobody ever went back and updated the internal links or collapsed the old rules, and the chain will keep growing with the next migration.
Where this comes from
See whether this is costing you anything
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