Redirect chains and rankings

[Optimal_Strategies]

Hi All,

I've got interesting question for Moz community today. Has redirect chain got any impact on rankings or not?

Thank you in advance.

[paints-n-design]

depends, if 302 redirects included sure it has an impact. Also it is not great for crawling, not for your tools like moz, not for google - but more important imho - a redirect costs time, time a user may not want to spent. So I guess you want to reduce redirects to speed up your site. And of course it is best practice to have no redirects linked internally.

[R0bin_L0rd]

Hi, similar response to Andreas but I suppose a bit stronger. Rule of thumb is that with every redirect you use up Google's processing power (meaning it's likely to spend less time elsewhere on your site) and that you lose some link equity at each step. So, if we're answering the question "is a redirect chain less-than-ideal for SEO?" then I would say yes - we should remove redirect chains where we can.

However, the question we're answering is "does a redirect chain have any impact on rankings?" To be honest there is a huge range there. If we're talking about one redirect chain, which has two hops (the least problematic version of having a redirect chain) then it's probably unlikely to cause too many issues. It'd be a nice-to-fix but not something I'd spend 5 hours dev time sorting out. If you're talking about thousands of links on your site going through multiple redirect hops, that becomes much more problematic and I'd want to get that fixed more urgently.

Unfortunately, as with many things in SEO, the answer here is "it depends". Hope that helps!