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"Redirect chain" error in Site Audit
"Redirect chain" error in Site Audit

Learn more about the "Redirect chain" issue in Ahrefs' Site Audit and how to fix it on your website.

Nick Churick avatar
Written by Nick Churick
Updated over a week ago

What triggers this issue?

This issue reports URLs that result in a series of redirects.

Example:

https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-metrics (301 Moved Permanently) ->
https://blog.ahrefs.com/seo-metrics/ (301 Moved Permanently) ->
https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-metrics/ (200 OK)

As you can see, there is more than one redirect between the initial URL and the destination URL.

Why is it important?

Redirect chain is a series of redirects between the initial URL and the destination URL.

Googlebot, as well as most browsers, is able to follow redirect chains if they are not too long.

However, even when set up correctly, chaining redirects may inflict damage on the visitors' user experience, slowing down the page loading speeds. Besides, redirect chains complicate your website's internal linking for the search engine crawlers.

How to fix it?

Review the list of URLs that generate a chain of redirects.

For a given URL, click on the number of inlinks to access the list of pages that have a link to the first URL in a chain.

Where practically possible, replace links to redirecting URLs on these pages with direct links to the final destination URL in the redirect chain.
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If you cannot omit redirection, replace the redirect chain with a single 301 redirect to a valid 200 page. Where redirect chains are necessary, make sure the number of redirects is less than 5.

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