A redirect chain is a sequence of two or more redirects in a row before a browser or crawler reaches the final destination URL — for example, URL A redirecting to URL B, which itself redirects to URL C.
A single, direct redirect (A straight to C) is normal and generally harmless. A chain happens when redirects accumulate over time — often from repeated site migrations, URL restructuring, or redirects pointing to other redirects instead of being updated to point straight at the final URL each time a change is made. Each extra hop in a chain adds a small amount of load time, since the browser or crawler has to make an additional request before reaching the real destination. Search engine crawlers also have a practical (though not strictly fixed) tolerance for how many redirect hops they'll follow before giving up, meaning a long enough chain risks the final page not being reached or indexed at all. A redirect loop — where a chain eventually points back to an earlier URL in the same chain — is a more severe version of this problem that can result in the destination never being reached at all.
Redirect chains are a quiet source of both a slower experience and unnecessary crawl inefficiency, and they tend to accumulate invisibly over successive site changes unless someone periodically audits and flattens them back to direct, single-hop redirects.
There's no official hard limit search engines publish, but every additional hop adds delay and risk, so the practical guidance is simply to keep it as short as possible — ideally a single, direct redirect rather than a chain at all.
A chain is a sequence of redirects that eventually reaches a real destination, just with unnecessary extra hops along the way. A loop happens when the chain eventually points back to a URL already earlier in the sequence, meaning the destination is never actually reached.
Update each redirect in the chain to point directly at the true final destination URL, rather than at the next link in the chain — collapsing the whole sequence into a single hop.
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