Redirect chains are technical debt with interest

Redirect chains are technical debt with interest
Every hop is a request, a wait, and one more place something can break. Chains form quietly: a site move, then a category rename, then a protocol switch, and now one old address walks through three hops before it lands anywhere.
How to clean them:
— Crawl your own site and export every URL returning a 3xx.
— For each one, follow the chain to the end and record only the final destination.
— Rewrite the rule so the original points straight at that destination. One hop, always.
— Delete rules for URLs that no longer receive traffic or links. Rule files rot, and a bloated one taxes every request you serve.
— Watch for loops. Two rules pointing at each other will happily serve errors forever.
Then check the type. A temporary redirect that has been in place for years is telling crawlers to keep the old address indexed. That is rarely what anyone meant.
One hop or no hop. There is no third option worth defending.