Paste any URL and follow it hop by hop — every 301, 302 and refresh with its status code, chains counted, loops caught, verdict in plain English. Essential after migrations, and any time a page "works fine" in the browser but rankings say otherwise.
Each hop leaks a little of three budgets at once. Speed: every hop is a full network round-trip before any content loads — on mobile, a three-hop chain can add over a second. Crawl budget: Googlebot spends a fetch on every hop; on large sites that's fetches not spent on your actual pages. Equity: a single 301 passes signals cleanly, but chains multiply the places where a link can rot into a 404 the next time anything changes.
| Type | Meaning | SEO effect |
|---|---|---|
| 301 Moved Permanently | The URL has a new permanent home. | Transfers ranking signals. The workhorse for migrations and URL changes. |
| 302 Found (temporary) | Temporarily elsewhere; the original will return. | Old URL stays indexed. Use only for genuinely temporary moves (A/B tests, geo routing). |
| 307 / 308 | Strict temporary / permanent (method preserved). | Same SEO behavior as 302/301; common on HTTPS upgrades (HSTS shows as 307). |
| Meta refresh | An HTML tag reloads the page after N seconds. | Slow and treated with suspicion — instant off-site refreshes are a spam/compromise signal. Replace with a server redirect. |
| JavaScript redirect | Script sets location after load. | Google usually processes it eventually, but it's the slowest and least reliable option. Last resort only. |
Google has said a single clean 301 passes full PageRank. The loss creeps in with chains — every extra hop adds latency, burns crawl budget, and multiplies the chances one link in the chain breaks later. One hop is fine; the goal is never more.
Googlebot follows up to ten hops before giving up, but trust erodes much earlier. In practice: one hop is normal, two is worth fixing, three or more is a finding that belongs on someone's task list.
A 301 says "moved permanently — transfer the signals to the new URL." A 302 says "temporary — keep the old URL indexed." A 302 left in place for months holds ranking signals hostage at an address that no longer exists. If the move is permanent, say so with a 301 or 308.
A redirects to B, and B redirects back to A (sometimes via a longer circle). Browsers give up with an error and search engines drop the page from the index entirely. Loops usually appear when a CMS rule and a server rule fight each other — this tool flags them explicitly.
No — that is the classic three-hop chain (http → https → https+www → final page) and it triples the cost of every inbound link. Collapse protocol and host canonicalization into a single rule so any variant reaches the final URL in one hop.
One URL at a time, this tool. Site-wide, you need a crawler that records every hop — PeakKR's site audit traces redirects on every internal link and files the chains as fix-it tasks with an owner.
Doing a full site move? Work through the website migration SEO checklist — it covers redirects plus everything else that breaks.
Do this on every page, without the copy-paste. The PeakKR SEO Assistant for Chrome runs these checks on whatever page you're viewing — plus broken links, Core Web Vitals, live tag inspection, and one-click tasks into your agency workspace.
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Summit
Hi, I'm Summit — your AI guide inside PeakKR. I help agencies plan the day, draft client updates and keep every project on track. Come climb with me.
