Redirecting a redirect - thoughts?

[neooptic]

Hi! A client has just had 14k 404s pop up in his WMT. I think this is because a page that they redirected to had moved. My question is, can I clean these up by redirecting the page the original redirect was one? If so, will it have any negative impact?

[MikeRoberts]

It is usually better to redirect one to one instead of redirecting from a redirect. Where possible it should be avoided because eventually, if you chain too many redirects to redirects, Google will stop caring. There will be no negative impact from changing an old redirect to point at a more relevant page. You may want to double-check that the level of traffic and inbound links pointing to the page is worth going through the trouble of the 301 instead of letting it 404. Sometimes it can be better to just let a page die if no one is clicking through on it.