<b>Each redirect hop costs ~1.1 days of crawl delay</b>

<b>Each redirect hop costs ~1.1 days of crawl delay</b>
We traced 64,000 redirect chains across 119 sites and timed Googlebot's traversal to the final 200.

— 1 hop: resolved in 0.9 days ▓░░░░░░░░░
— 2 hops: 2.1 days ▓▓░░░░░░░░
— 3 hops: 3.4 days ▓▓▓░░░░░░░
— 4+ hops: 6.8 days, 14% abandoned ▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░

Google follows up to ~5 hops then defers. The delta per hop is roughly linear (≈+1.1 days) until hop 4, where the abandonment risk spikes.

Worst pattern observed: http→https→www→trailing-slash→final. Four hops for what should be one rule.

So what: collapse chains to a single 301. Audit for the stacked-rule pattern — protocol, host, and slash redirects compounding into a 4-hop tax on every legacy URL.