Collapsing 5-hop redirect chains recovered 30% of crawl on a migration.
Post-migration, a site's traffic stayed flat for two months and they blamed "Google being slow." Logs said otherwise.
The old-to-new mapping had been done lazily: many URLs went old → category → temp → new → final, four or five hops each. Googlebot follows chains but spends a fetch on every hop, and it caps how deep it'll chase before giving up.
30% of crawl activity was being burned re-traversing redirect chains instead of crawling live pages.
They flattened every chain to a single 301. Crawl on the actual new URLs jumped immediately; full reindexing of the new structure completed in three weeks instead of stalling.
No, the migration wasn't "settling." It was leaking crawl into redirect hops.
Every hop is a wasted fetch. One redirect, one destination.
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Collapsing 5-hop redirect chains recovered 30% of crawl on a migration.
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