The slow-bleed redirect chain from URL 'cleanups'

The slow-bleed redirect chain from URL 'cleanups'

"We tidy our URLs every redesign — old links still work, we redirect them."

Until the chain eats them.

Each redesign adds a hop: /old → /v2 → /new → /final. Every link still 'works,' so nobody notices the mistake — but each extra hop loses a little signal, slows crawl, and after enough chains some bots stop following.

Here's what actually happens: three redesigns later, a page acquires a four-hop chain, the canonical points at hop two, and the sitemap lists hop three. Now your strongest backlinks dribble through four 301s to land on a URL your own systems disagree about.

Fix: after any URL change, audit redirects and flatten chains — every old URL should hop once, directly to the final destination. Update the canonical and the sitemap to the final URL too. One hop, no detours. (A redirect that works is not the same as a redirect that's efficient.)