Your redirect chains are a slow crawl tax you forgot about

Your redirect chains are a slow crawl tax you forgot about

Everyone obsesses over blocking pages. Few audit the redirects that quietly multiply fetches. Every hop in a chain is a separate Googlebot request: A to B to C to final is up to four fetches to land one page.

Google follows roughly five hops per crawl session, then gives up and tries again later. On a site with thousands of legacy redirects from three migrations, that's a real and pointless drain — and a discovery delay for the destination.

The fix is unglamorous: point every redirect straight at the final 200, one hop. Audit your .htaccess and middleware for stacked rules from past relaunches.

No tool needed. Just flatten the chains.

Every extra hop is a fetch you bought for nothing.