How to Diagnose Redirects With the Redirect Checker

This guide explains how to interpret the Redirect Checker output and prioritize technical SEO work while keeping essential operating instructions on the tool page.

What Is a Redirect Checker?

A redirect checker follows a URL through every redirect hop and reports the full chain — from the original URL to the final destination, including the HTTP status code at each step. This tells you whether a URL is returning the correct 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) redirect, whether there's a redirect chain adding unnecessary latency, or whether a redirect is broken entirely.

Redirect chains are one of the most common and most overlooked technical SEO problems. Every hop in a chain adds a small amount of load time and potentially dilutes the PageRank signal passing through the redirect. A chain of three or more redirects is a crawl budget problem — Googlebot may abandon the chain before reaching the final destination, leaving the destination page without the link equity it should be receiving.

How to Use This Redirect Checker

Enter any URL and click Check. The tool follows every redirect hop and displays the full chain with HTTP status codes at each step. A healthy redirect looks like this: 301 → 200. A problematic chain looks like: 301 → 302 → 301 → 200 — three hops where one clean 301 should do the job.

Use this tool whenever you migrate a site, consolidate pages, or update URL structures. Check every old URL to confirm it's sending a clean 301 to the correct destination. Also use it to audit your existing redirects periodically — redirects accumulate over time and chains form when the destination of an old redirect later gets redirected itself.

301 vs 302 Redirects: Which to Use

A 301 tells Google the move is permanent — the old URL is gone for good and all ranking signals should transfer to the new one. Use it for all permanent URL changes: site migrations, slug cleanups, deleted pages being replaced by similar content. A 302 tells Google the redirect is temporary — the old URL will return, so keep its index entry. Use it only for genuinely temporary situations like A/B testing or maintenance pages. Using a 302 when you mean 301 is one of the most common redirect mistakes — it prevents PageRank from transferring and can leave the old URL indexed while the new one doesn't rank.

Related tools: SEO Audit Tool · Bulk Index Checker · Broken Link Checker