Too many redirects before the page

Why it matters

Every redirect is another round trip before anything loads, and crawlers give up on long chains. Google's advice is to "keep the number of redirects in the chain low, ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5"; Googlebot stops altogether after 10 hops, and link-preview scrapers are less patient than that. A loop never arrives at all, so the page can't be indexed or shared.

Sources: Site moves with URL changes for 3 and 5; How HTTP status codes affect Google's crawlers for "Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops". We warn over 3 hops and call 5 or more an error.

How to fix it

Point the first address straight at the last one. The usual cause is rules stacked over the years (http → https, then → www, then → a trailing slash, then → a renamed page). Replace them with one rule that goes to the final address in a single 301, and update your own links and sitemap to use the final address.

Examples

These are the rule's own test pages, and what it says about each. They are run on every change to the rule book.

They differ only in what the server answered:

Asked for: http://example.com/
Ended up at: https://www.example.com/home/
4 redirects: 301 Moved Permanently → https://example.com/301 Moved Permanently → https://www.example.com/302 Found → https://www.example.com/home301 Moved Permanently → https://www.example.com/home/

Warning4 redirects before the page. Each is a wasted round trip; send the first address straight to the last.

fail-four-hops

Asked for: https://www.example.com/a
Answered: no answer at all
The chain: goes round in a loop
2 redirects: 302 Found → https://www.example.com/b302 Found → https://www.example.com/a

ErrorThe address redirects in a loop and never arrives: https://www.example.com/a → https://www.example.com/b → https://www.example.com/a

fail-loop

Asked for: http://example.com/
Ended up at: https://www.example.com/
2 redirects: 301 Moved Permanently → https://example.com/301 Moved Permanently → https://www.example.com/

Passed2 redirects, which is fine.

pass-two-hops