Follow the Redirect Rabbit Hole
You type http://www.example.com. It 301s to https://www.example.com. Which 301s to https://example.com. That’s two hops before anyone sees your page. Each hop adds 100-500ms of latency and burns crawl budget. And you probably didn’t know the chain existed.
Enter a URL and this tool follows every redirect until it reaches the final destination, showing the HTTP status code and destination URL at each step. It’ll also catch redirect loops, the dreaded ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.
Why This Matters for SEO
Every redirect costs you something. Crawl budget: Google has a limited number of pages it’ll crawl per session. Each redirect eats into that. Page speed: 100-500ms per hop adds up, especially on mobile. Link equity: 301 redirects pass most link juice, but some is lost at each hop. Chain three redirects together and you’re leaving ranking power on the table.
The fix is almost always consolidation. That two-hop chain from HTTP www to HTTPS www to HTTPS non-www? Replace it with a single redirect from HTTP www directly to HTTPS non-www.
301 vs. 302, Get This Right
A 301 tells Google “this page has permanently moved.” It transfers link equity to the new URL. A 302 says “this is temporary, the original URL is coming back.” Google holds the link equity on the original URL and doesn’t fully transfer it.
If you migrated your site six months ago and you’re still using 302 redirects, you’re leaking ranking authority. Switch them to 301s. If the redirect genuinely is temporary (a maintenance page during deployment, an A/B test), keep it as 302.
Post-Migration Checks
Just finished a domain migration? Check every important old URL. The redirect should go directly to the corresponding new page, not to the homepage, not through an intermediate page, and definitely not into a loop.
Inbound links from external sites are worth checking too. If a high-authority site links to your old URL, that redirect chain determines how much value reaches your new page.
The tool needs a backend to follow redirects (browser CORS restrictions prevent client-side redirect following). Use the HTTP Headers Viewer to inspect response headers at each hop. The Canonical URL Generator helps with URL normalization on the destination pages.