Redirect Chain Analyzer

Trace every redirect hop, detect loops, and identify SEO issues in your URL redirect chains.

Enter any URL to trace its complete redirect path

How to Use the Redirect Chain Analyzer

Quick Analysis

  1. 1 Enter the URL you want to trace — with or without https://
  2. 2 Complete the reCAPTCHA verification
  3. 3 Click "Analyze Redirects" to start tracing
  4. 4 Review each hop in the chain, response codes, timings, and detected issues

What You'll Discover

  • Every redirect hop with URL, HTTP status code, and response time
  • Whether the final URL is served over HTTPS
  • Redirect loops, missing Location headers, and chain length warnings
  • Mixed use of 301 and 302 codes that can dilute SEO value

What This Tool Analyzes

Redirect Chain Tracing

  • Traces up to 20 redirect hops manually, one by one
  • Records HTTP status code and response time for each hop
  • Resolves relative redirect URLs (e.g. /new-page → https://domain.com/new-page)
  • Detects protocol for each hop: HTTP or HTTPS
  • Measures total cumulative time across the full chain

SEO Issue Detection

  • Redirect loops — URLs that redirect back to themselves
  • Long chains (3+ hops) that slow down crawling and dilute PageRank
  • Mixed 301/302 redirects that confuse search engine signals
  • HTTPS → HTTP downgrades that break secure connections
  • Missing Location header on redirect responses

Why Redirect Chains Matter for SEO

PageRank & Link Equity

Every redirect hop in a chain loses a small amount of link equity. A URL with 4 redirects passes significantly less PageRank to the final destination than a direct URL. Keeping chains short — ideally a single hop — preserves the maximum SEO value.

Crawl Budget

Googlebot has a limited crawl budget per site. Long redirect chains consume that budget inefficiently — the bot must follow each hop before reaching the real page. For large sites, this can delay indexing of important content.

Page Speed & UX

Each redirect adds a round-trip HTTP request, adding 100–300 ms or more to page load time for real users. Google's Core Web Vitals and ranking algorithms penalize slow pages, making short redirect chains important for both SEO and user experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Step-by-Step Tracing

Every hop is traced individually, showing the exact URL, HTTP status code, and response time for each redirect in the chain.

Loop Detection

Automatically detects redirect loops that would cause ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS errors in browsers and block Googlebot from crawling the page.

Timing Per Hop

Shows the response time in milliseconds for each individual hop, helping you identify which redirects are contributing most to page load delay.

Protocol Detection

Identifies whether each hop is served over HTTP or HTTPS, and flags insecure downgrades from HTTPS to HTTP that can expose users and harm trust signals.

Status Code Analysis

Differentiates between permanent (301, 308) and temporary (302, 303, 307) redirects, flagging when temporary redirects are used where permanent ones should be.

SEO Issue Summary

Consolidates all detected issues into a prioritized summary with severity levels — Critical, Warning, and Info — so you know exactly what to fix first.