A field guide to redirect chains
How three harmless-looking redirects cost one retailer 138 wasted crawls a day, and a ten-minute way to find your own.
Tobias Wren
Co-founder, engineering
Every site migration leaves redirects behind. Every later migration adds more on top. After a few years a link from 2019 can bounce three times before it lands.
Why it matters
Each hop costs a crawler a request. On a large site that budget is finite, and it gets spent on dead ends instead of new pages.
The fix is boring: point every old URL straight at its final destination. Rankwick finds chains longer than one hop and writes the redirect map for you.
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A field guide to redirect chains
How three harmless-looking redirects cost one retailer 138 wasted crawls a day, and a ten-minute way to find your own.