Redirect & canonical chain checker
Follow a URL the way browsers and crawlers do: every hop with its real status code, then the landing page's canonical and meta refresh — the two "invisible" extra hops most redirect checkers never show.
What gets checked
Each hop's status (301/308 permanent vs 302/303/307 temporary), https downgrades mid-chain, chain length, loops, dead ends, meta-refresh redirects on the landing page, and whether the destination canonicalizes to yet another URL — the hop that costs you rankings without ever appearing in an HTTP trace. Every hop re-runs the same SSRF guards; this checker follows at most 5 hops per run (its own budget, not a Google number).
Canonical-consolidation behavior last verified against Google Search's duplicate-URL documentation 2026-08-19
FAQ
Do redirects lose PageRank?
Google has said 301 and 302 redirects no longer lose PageRank. What chains do cost is time — crawl budget and user latency per hop — and reliability: Google follows a limited number of hops before giving up, and every extra hop is one more thing that can break.
301 or 308 — which one?
Both are permanent. 301 may let clients change POST to GET; 308 forbids changing the method. For ordinary page moves 301 is standard; use 308 when the resource accepts form posts or API calls that must survive the redirect intact.
Why does the canonical count as a hop?
When a chain lands on a page whose rel="canonical" points elsewhere, search engines transfer indexing signals to that canonical target — effectively one more redirect that only crawlers take. Users and uptime monitors never see it, which is exactly why it goes stale.