Is a 301 or a 302 better for SEO?

For a permanent move, 301 or 308. Google treats them as a strong signal that the target should be the canonical URL; 302, 303 and 307 are a weak signal. Use a temporary redirect only when the old URL is coming back.

How many redirects will Googlebot follow?

Googlebot generally follows 10 redirect hops. Beyond that, Search Console reports a redirect error. Every hop also costs a request, so point links and redirects straight at the final URL.

How do I find a redirect loop?

Enter the URL. The checker stops as soon as a hop points back to a URL already in the chain and shows the loop. Loops usually come from two rules fighting, such as a trailing-slash rule and a CMS redirect.

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Redirect checker

Follow a URL hop by hop and see every status code, Location and timing, up to the page it lands on and the canonical that page declares. Check up to 20 URLs at once.

Up to 10 checks a minute. Pages are fetched from IndexCyborg's servers; private and local addresses are refused.

What the redirect chain checker shows

Each URL is requested without following redirects, so every hop is visible: its status code, the Location it points to and how long the server took to answer. The checker follows up to 10 hops, the number Googlebot generally follows, and flags:

Chains of two or more redirects
Loops, where the chain comes back to a URL it already visited
Temporary redirects (302, 303, 307) where you may have meant a permanent one
HTTPS pages redirecting down to HTTP, and 3xx responses without a Location header
Chains that end in a 4xx or 5xx, and final pages that declare a different canonical

The user-agent menu changes only the user-agent string. Requests still come from IndexCyborg, so a site that verifies Googlebot by IP may answer differently than it answers Google.

Redirect status codes, as Google treats them

Code	Meaning	For Google
301, 308	Moved permanently	Strong signal that the target is canonical
302, 303, 307	Found, see other, temporary	Weak signal that the target is canonical

Source: How HTTP status codes affect Google's crawlers. 301 vs 302 redirects covers when each is right, and redirect chains how to flatten them after a migration.

Redirects in Search Console

A URL that redirects shows up in the Page indexing report as “Page with redirect”. That's expected for old URLs: Google indexes the target instead. Chains that are too long, loops and redirects to bad URLs show up as “Redirect error”. See Page with redirect and Redirect error for each.

How IndexCyborg handles this

IndexCyborg fetches the new and changed URLs it finds in your sitemaps and records any redirect chain with each hop as evidence. A sitemap URL that redirects is flagged, since sitemaps should list final URLs, and chains longer than two hops are raised as a warning. Redirecting pages are never sent for Request indexing. It's part of the technical SEO checklist it runs continuously.

Frequently asked questions

Is a 301 or a 302 better for SEO?: For a permanent move, 301 or 308. Google treats them as a strong signal that the target should be the canonical URL; 302, 303 and 307 are a weak signal. Use a temporary redirect only when the old URL is coming back.
How many redirects will Googlebot follow?: Googlebot generally follows 10 redirect hops. Beyond that, Search Console reports a redirect error. Every hop also costs a request, so point links and redirects straight at the final URL.
How do I find a redirect loop?: Enter the URL. The checker stops as soon as a hop points back to a URL already in the chain and shows the loop. Loops usually come from two rules fighting, such as a trailing-slash rule and a CMS redirect.