Case study: collapsing redirect chains restored 8k indexed pages

Case study: collapsing redirect chains restored 8k indexed pages

Setup: After three site migrations, a publisher had redirect chains 4–7 hops deep on 8,000 URLs. Googlebot was abandoning crawls mid-chain. Screaming Frog's 'Redirect Chains' report mapped every hop.

What it did well:
— Exported the full chain list, then we rewrote rules so every old URL did a single 301 to the final target
— GSC 'Page with redirect' exclusions cleared and the final URLs re-indexed; ~8k pages back in three weeks

Where it fell short:
— Each hop bleeds a little signal; even after fixing, some pages ranked below their pre-migration spots
— Screaming Frog's chain report is export-only — no auto-fix; rewriting 8k rules was a real sprint

Verdict: 4.5/5. Chains are silent index-killers after multiple migrations.

Best for: sites with migration history. Not for: clean single-migration sites — you likely have none.