Redirect chain (2+ hops)
redirect_chainShort answer
The URL redirects to a URL that redirects again. Google follows up to 10 hops and link value is not lost, but each hop is an extra request for crawlers and extra waiting for visitors. Make every redirect point directly at the final page; Google suggests keeping chains to no more than three hops, and ideally one.
Why it matters
Chains build up naturally: http:// → https://, then non-www → www, then an old slug → a new one. Three rules, three hops. Visitors wait for each round trip (on mobile, 100–300 ms per hop), crawlers spend budget on URLs that return nothing, and if a chain ever reaches ten hops Googlebot gives up and reports a redirect error. Chains also make debugging migrations painful, because the "real" redirect is hidden behind others.
How Glimana detects it
The crawler follows every redirect and counts the hops to the first non-3xx response. The rule fires at two or more hops; the evidence shows the hop count and the final URL.
How to fix it
- Find the affected pages in Glimana. Open Issues › Redirect chain (2+ hops). Every affected page is a row; open one to see the evidence Glimana recorded for it (the measured value, the offending element or the target URL). The same list sits on the task card under Tasks, and the page's own detail view under Pages shows its full signals.
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Apply the fix on your platform.
Find the first URL in the chain and change its redirect target to the last URL in the chain. Leave the intermediate redirects in place for anyone who still links to them, but make each of them point to the final destination too.
- Redirection or Rank Math → Redirections: open the rule for the source URL and change its target to the final URL.
- Scheme and host redirects are usually in
.htaccessor in the host's control panel (Force HTTPS, primary domain). Combine them into one rule that goes straight tohttps://www.in a single 301. - Re-test with a crawler: the source should now return a single 301 followed by 200.
Shopify handles
http→httpsand primary-domain redirects itself in one hop. Chains come from Navigation → URL redirects where A→B and B→C both exist; edit A to point at C.Order rules so that scheme, host and path normalisation happen in one
301with the full final URL. Innginx, use a singlereturn 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;on the non-canonical server blocks rather than chainingrewriterules. -
Publish and clear caches. Apply the server or CDN change (reload Nginx/Apache, save the Cloudflare rule), purge the cache, then check the live response with
curl -sI https://your-domain/page— the status line and headers you see there are exactly what Glimana and Googlebot get. - Verify in Glimana. Open the task under Tasks and click Mark as done. The affected pages are queued for a verification crawl within a few hours, and the task closes when each reaches its final page in a single hop. If the check still fails, the task returns to New with a note; when it passes, the task is listed under Resolved technical issues on Impact reports. To check sooner, use Re-crawl affected pages on the issue.
How the fix is verified
After you mark the task done, affected URLs are re-fetched; the task closes when each reaches its final page in a single hop.
FAQ
Does a redirect chain lose PageRank?
No. Google has stated that 301, 302 and other redirects pass full link value, and that chains do not lose it either. The cost is crawl efficiency and latency, not ranking signal.