Redirect error

What it means

Google’s definition lists four failures: “A redirect chain that was too long”, “A redirect loop”, “A redirect URL that eventually exceeded the max URL length”, and “A bad or empty URL in the redirect chain”.¹ It happens during crawling, before Google sees any content.

Google ignores content on redirecting URLs and processes the final target instead.² When there’s no final target, there’s nothing to index.

How many hops?

Google’s documentation says its crawlers follow up to 10 hops by default.² In 2020 John Mueller described the limit as “up to 5 hops in the chain per crawl attempt”.⁵ The two may describe different things, one crawl versus the whole chain, but Google hasn’t reconciled them publicly. Google’s practical advice is the same either way: redirect straight to the final page, and keep any chain under 5 hops.³ For robots.txt files, Google follows at least five hops.⁹

Is it a problem?

Find the cause

Answer a few questions to narrow it down. Each cause is explained below.

HTTP and HTTPS rules fight

A common loop. Cloudflare’s documentation describes it: in Flexible mode, Cloudflare connects to your server over HTTP, and if the server redirects all HTTP requests to HTTPS, the redirect never ends.⁷ The fix is a certificate on the server and the Full (strict) mode.

www, slash or case rules in two places

A server rule adds www while a CMS setting removes it, or one layer adds a trailing slash and another strips it. Each rule is right on its own. Together they loop.

Chains from repeated migrations

Each move adds a hop: http to https, old domain to new, old URL pattern to new. Google advises redirecting every old URL to the final destination directly.³

Redirects that depend on cookies, location or user agent

A site that sets a cookie and redirects until the cookie is present can loop for a client that doesn’t keep cookies. Google’s renderer clears cookies between page loads.⁸ Location and language redirects can also send a crawler somewhere different from you.

A rule that grows the URL, or writes no URL

The last two sub-types in Google’s list usually come from a single faulty rule: one that keeps appending to the URL, or one that sends a redirect without a valid destination.¹

The four redirect errors

Pick a type to see its usual cause and a curl command that reproduces it.

curl -sL -o /dev/null -w '%{num_redirects} hops -> %{url_effective} (%{http_code})\n' \
  https://example.com/old-page

curl -sIL --max-redirs 12 https://example.com/page | grep -iE '^(HTTP|location)'

curl -sIL --max-redirs 12 https://example.com/page \
  | grep -i '^location' | awk '{ print length($2) " chars: " substr($2, 1, 80) }'

curl -sI https://example.com/page | grep -iE '^(HTTP|location)'

curl -sIL --max-redirs 12 \
  -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)' \
  https://example.com/page | grep -iE '^(HTTP|location)'

Google’s report also suggests a web debugging tool such as Lighthouse to get more detail.¹ URL Inspection is less useful here: Google says its “Inspection Tools doesn’t follow redirects”.²

How to fix it

1. Export the URLs from the report row and group them by pattern: protocol, host, folder.
2. Trace one URL per group with curl, with no cookies and as Googlebot.
3. Break any loop by keeping each rule (HTTPS, www, trailing slash) in one place.
4. Rewrite chains so each old URL goes to its final destination in one server-side 301 or 308.⁴
5. Update internal links and the sitemap to the final URLs.
6. Click Validate fix.

Myths

Some top-ranking guides say these. Google’s documentation says otherwise.

How long it takes

• Up to about 2 weeksfor Search Console to validate a fix, sometimes much longer.¹
• A few weeksfor most pages of a small to medium site to move after a migration, by Google’s estimate.³
• At least 1 yearto keep redirects in place after a move.³

Redirect error vs page with redirect

Questions