Found 9-hop redirect chains. Flattened them. Crawl waste gone.

Found 9-hop redirect chains. Flattened them. Crawl waste gone.

Site had survived 3 migrations. Some URLs redirected A→B→C→D→...→I — nine hops. Googlebot was burning crawl budget and link equity leaked at every hop.

Move:
— Crawled the full redirect map, found every chain over 1 hop
— Rewrote all of them to point directly to the final destination (A→I, one hop)
— ~3,400 redirects flattened

5 weeks: logs showed redirect-status crawl hits drop ~70%. Several deep pages that had been losing equity through the chains recovered 4-8 positions.

Audit redirect chains after every migration. They silently stack up and each hop bleeds a little PageRank and a lot of crawl budget.