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You are here: Home / Google / How Many 301 Redirect Hops Will Googlebot Follow?

How Many 301 Redirect Hops Will Googlebot Follow?

October 16, 2015 at 4:19 am PST By Jennifer Slegg

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googlebot 301 redirect chains

John Mueller had a bit of an update on how Googlebot handles 301 redirects when they are in a redirect chain – where you might get redirected multiple times through 301s until you land on the end destination page.  In today’s Google Webmaster Office Hours, he said that the maximum number of hops Googlebot will follow in a chain is 5.

Googlebot seems to be improving with age, as this is more than the number of chained redirects Matt Cutts recommended previously.

John Mueller said that Googlebot will follow a 301 redirect chain for up to 5 hops, and if it isn’t able to resolve a page by the 5th hop, Googlebot will try the next time the page is crawled.

In general, what happens is Googlebot will follow 5 301s in a row, then if we can’t reach the destination page, then we will try again the next time.

Matt Cutts in one of his webmaster help videos back in 2011 recommended 1-2 hops as idea, 3 if needed, but suggested that once you got into the 4-6 range, the success rate of Googlebot following those redirect hops was very low.

He does also remind people that having these long chains of redirects can be problematic from a user end as well, especially if latency is involved.  And of course, the lower number of redirects you are chaining, the less likely something will go awry mid-chain.

For best practices, the lesser number of redirects chained together, especially when you also consider the loss of link juice when redirected.

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Jennifer Slegg

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Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.
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Comments

  1. Patrick Coombe says

    October 16, 2015 at 1:59 pm

    thanks for reporting on this Jennifer, as I said on Twitter I’ve never seen beyond 2-3 hops in a redirect chain but still good to know.

    One also starts to wonder how much “link juice” /PR is lost in a 5 hop scenerio.

  2. Ken Hirooka says

    May 31, 2016 at 6:09 pm

    FYI he told it in this April as well 🙂

    https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/E4PqAhRJB2V

    “How many redirects can you do at the same time? We follow up to 5 in a chain (please keep any redirect chain as short as possible), but you can redirect as many URLs on your site as you want at the same time.”

Trackbacks

  1. 9 easy-to-miss crawl reports in Screaming Frog and DeepCrawl that pack serious SEO punch says:
    June 2, 2016 at 6:46 am

    […] Remember, you should redirect once to the destination page, if possible. As Google’s John Mueller explained, if Google sees more than five redirects, it can stop following, and it might try again during the […]

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