Q: After two migrations our old links now hop through 3 redirects. Does that hurt?

Q: After two migrations our old links now hop through 3 redirects. Does that hurt?

A: It does, and you're smart to catch it. Short answer: redirect chains waste crawl budget, slow pages, and at enough hops Google may stop following them entirely.

Long answer: A "chain" is when URL A redirects to B, B to C, C to D. Each hop adds latency and bleeds a little signal. Google generally follows up to about 10 hops in one crawl, but well before that you're hurting users and crawl efficiency. This piles up silently when each new migration layers redirects on top of the old ones instead of updating them.

The fix:
— Flatten every chain so the original URL points directly to the final destination in one hop
— Re-export your rule list after each future migration and collapse again

Next step: crawl your site, sort by "redirect hops," and rewrite anything with 2+ to a single 301.