Mistake: redirect chains nobody bothered to flatten

Mistake: redirect chains nobody bothered to flatten

HTTP to HTTPS, then non-www to www, then old-url to new-url, then trailing-slash normalization. Four hops to reach one page. You did each redirect at a different time and never collapsed them.

Each hop is a separate request Googlebot has to make. On a large site, multiply that across millions of URLs and you've quietly doubled the crawl cost of your whole inventory.

Google follows up to a handful of hops, then may give up — and you've burned crawl getting nowhere.

The fix: flatten every chain to a single 301. Source straight to final destination. Audit with a crawler that reports hop counts.

One redirect is a sign. A chain of four is a maintenance debt Googlebot pays interest on.