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Removing Redirect Chains

Updated over a year ago

📘 This article explains locating and removing redirect chains using Botify reports.

Overview

Redirect chains are multiple redirects from the page requested to the final destination. Identifying and removing redirect chains is important to your site's health since they decrease page load time for both search engines and users. Redirect chains will likely affect your crawl budget, ranking, and link equity.

To remove redirect chains from your website, you first need to identify the following:

  • The URL (Page A) redirecting to another URL that is also redirected (Page B)

  • Where the redirect chain ends (Page D)

  • Which pages link to page A (Page E: there may be several)

To fix the redirect chain, replace any links to Page A with links to Page D instead.

Removing Redirect Chains

To remove redirect chains, create a SiteCrawler report to identify the chains, then export the report.

Identifying Redirect Chains

  1. Navigate to the SiteCrawler > HTTP Codes report.

  2. In the Insights table, click on the "URLs in Redirect Chain" metric to view a URL Explorer report:
    ​

    usecase_redirect1.png


    The report identifies the pages that returned an HTTP 301 or 302 status code, the pages where they immediately redirect, the number of hops to reach the end of the chain, and the URL at the end of the chain (Ultimate Redirect Destination):

    usecase_redirect2.png


    To help identify where each URL in the chain may be linked from since not all links will necessarily point to the first URL in the chain, information is split into separate lines for chains with more than two hops: one line for the first page in the redirect chain and one line for each subsequent redirect:
    ​

    usecase_redirect3.png

  3. To find these incoming links, add the Source-Full URL column to find the linking source:
    ​

    usecase_redirect4.png


    The report now displays the internal linking source for each URL:

    usecase_redirect5.png

Exporting Data

You now have the following data:

  • The pages being redirected: URL Card column

  • The pages to which those pages are being redirected: Redirects to URL column

  • The final destination of the redirect chain after the number of hops identified in the second column: Ultimate Redirect Destination column.

  • Where the redirected pages (URL Card column) were linked from: Source - Full URL column.

To resolve these redirect chains:

  1. Click the Export as CSV link.
    ​

    usecase_redirect6.png

    ​

  2. Select all rows as the scope, then click Launch Export.
    ​

    usecase_redirect7.png

  3. In the exported file, replace links pointing to the URL in the Full URL column with the URL in the Ultimate Redirect Destination column to resolve the redirect chains.

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