Redirect Checker
Trace URL redirect chains to ensure search engines and users reach the correct destination. Identify 301/302 redirects, redirect loops, and measure response times.
Free Redirect Checker
Every extra hop in a redirect chain leaks link equity and adds latency. Our free tool traces the exact path a URL takes — step by step — so you can collapse chains and recover lost ranking power.
Know Your Redirects: 301 vs 302 vs 307
Moved Permanently
The gold standard for SEO. Passes up to 99% of link equity to the new destination. Use this for all permanent URL changes and site migrations.
Moved Temporarily
Intended for short-term redirects only. Search engines will not transfer ranking power until the redirect becomes permanent — a costly common mistake.
Temporary Redirect
The HTTP/1.1 equivalent of 302. The request method (POST, GET) is strictly preserved. Use 308 when you need a permanent version of this behavior.
How the Free Redirect Checker Works
- 1
Enter the Starting URL
Paste any URL — a legacy page, a deleted product, or a suspicious old blog post. Our system makes a clean server-side HTTP request with redirect-following disabled so every hop is captured individually.
- 2
Hop-by-Hop Chain Mapping
At each step, we record the HTTP status code returned, the Location header value (the next destination), and the response time in milliseconds. This full trace is what browsers hide from you.
- 3
Redirect Loop Detection
Our engine tracks every visited URL and immediately flags when a URL appears twice in the chain — the telltale sign of an infinite redirect loop that returns ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS to real users.
- 4
Visual Chain Diagram
Results are rendered as a clean step-by-step visual flow: start URL → intermediate hops → final destination. Timing at each hop helps identify where latency is being introduced.
Why Long Redirect Chains Destroy Rankings
Googlebot follows a maximum of five consecutive redirects before abandoning the crawl. If your URL requires six hops to resolve, Googlebot never reaches the final page, which is then never indexed. Additionally, each hop causes a small but measurable dilution of PageRank. A URL pointing to your homepage via a three-hop chain delivers meaningfully less authority than a direct 1-to-1 redirect.
The Right Way to Migrate a Website
During a site migration, implement 1-to-1 mappings: every old URL should redirect directly to its exact new counterpart. Avoid bulk redirecting thousands of old URLs to your homepage — Google treats this as a "soft 404" and strips the ranking signal entirely. After launch, run your most authoritative old URLs through this free redirect checker to confirm the chains resolve cleanly, then submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console to accelerate re-indexation.
HTTP to HTTPS: The Most Common Redirect Chain
The most widespread redirect chain in the modern web looks like this: http://domain.com → https://domain.com → https://www.domain.com. That is two hops when one is sufficient. Consolidate at the server level so all traffic hits a single canonical URL directly, without intermediate steps.