Redirect Checker: Status Codes, Chains, and Loops Worth Catching
What HTTP redirects really mean, where chains quietly destroy rank, and why a checker is the first tool anyone migrating a site should reach for.
1. The Two Status Codes You Will See Most Often
Permanent redirects use status code 301. Temporary redirects use 302, or 307 if the original HTTP method must be preserved. The 301 is the only code a search engine treats as permission to consolidate signals to the destination URL, so a redirect you want Google to honor permanently must be a 301 by spec. The 301 is read as a permanent move. The 302 stays read as temporary, and link equity stays on the source.
The most common mistake after a domain change or URL restructure is a 301 redirect set on the wrong URL or a 302 used where a 301 was intended. Misclassifying permanent as temporary prevents the consolidation effect that the migration was supposed to capture.
2. Why Redirect Chains Eat Equity
A redirect chain is when URL A redirects to URL B, which then redirects to URL C. Each hop in the chain drops a small fraction of link equity in modern Google, but more importantly each hop adds network latency to every request that hits URL A. A visitor or bot has to follow the chain, and crawlers may abandon long chains entirely if they hit too many hops.
The fix is a one-hop direct redirect: URL A redirects straight to URL C, no intermediate stop. A redirect checker surfaces chains by reporting the full list of status codes a URL produces along the way to its final destination, so a chain of three or four hops jumps off the report immediately.
3. Redirect Loops and the 500 Mystery
A redirect loop is when URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects back to URL A, recursively. Browsers give up after a small number of hops and show an error page. The error message blames the server rather than the redirect, which is why redirect loops are notorious for being slow to diagnose.
A redirect checker walks the chain step by step, follows each hop, detects cycles by tracking visited URLs, and reports the looping set explicitly. Running it against a network you suspect of looping is the fastest way to find the offending rule without a stack of curl invocations.
4. Crawl Budget and Why Sites Migrate One URL at a Time
Large sites typically migrate redirects in batches to avoid sending every URL through a new chain at once, which is a way of distributing crawl budget. A redirect checker on a sample of URLs before and after the cutover validates that the redirects are 301 and direct, not chained through the old URL scheme.
The post-migration check should sample URLs from every important template: product, category, article, tag, and the homepage. A pattern that holds for one URL template occasionally fails for another because of an oversight in the rewrite rule set.
Conclusion
A redirect checker is the cheapest possible migration safety net. ToolWise Free Redirect Checker reports the status code, follows every hop, and detects chains and loops in one run, all from your browser. Run it on your migration sample, fix any chain before a crawler finds it, and ship a clean cutover.