Flatten redirect chains in one cleanup pass

Flatten redirect chains in one cleanup pass
Client had chains 4 hops deep from years of migrations. Slow, leaky. The flatten:
— Crawl the site, open the Redirect Chains report in Screaming Frog
— Export it — you get the full hop path for every chained URL
— For each chain: find the FINAL destination, point the FIRST URL straight at it, one 301
— Fix internal links that point at any middle hop — send them to the final URL directly
— Re-crawl, confirm zero chains over one hop remain
— Check your sitemap doesn't list any redirecting URLs
Killed ~200 chains. Pages loaded faster and link equity stopped bleeding through hops.
Watch for loops — a chain that eventually points back to itself will 500 or infinite-loop; break it manually.