How to fix it
Break the cycle — usually one rule is rewriting a URL that another rule rewrites back.
When it is not a problem
Loops often depend on a header, a trailing slash or a cookie, which is why they can be invisible in a browser that has already been through the flow once and completely fatal to a crawler that has not.
How Rankelle handles it
- SeverityCritical. It stops a page being read, indexed or reached at all, so it outranks everything cosmetic on the list.
- 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.