How to fix it
Point the first redirect straight at the final destination.
When it is not a problem
Chains accumulate over years of migrations and each individual link was reasonable when it was added. They are worth clearing in one pass rather than one at a time.
How Rankelle handles it
- SeverityWarning. It costs traffic or clarity without stopping anything, which is where most real work lives.
- DetectionDetected by comparing pages against each other after the crawl finishes, because no single page can show it on its own.
- GroupingEvery page with this finding under the same URL pattern becomes one cause, with a confidence taken from how much of the pattern is affected. 400 of 400 is a template; 6 of 14 is phrased as a question.
- LandingThe affected URLs stay under cheap watch. When this finding is gone from all of them, the fix is marked landed without anyone reporting the deploy.
- VerdictAt landing, comparable untouched URLs are frozen as a control set. Twenty-eight days later the two are compared, and the fix can come back as having done nothing.
Try it on your own site, free
No card, and the free tier does not expire — the first verdict takes about six weeks to arrive.