It is not a new thing that the competition in the digital market in terms of Search Engine Optimization is really stiff and only those are surviving that have managed to catch up with the time to time changing algorithms of Google and other major search engines.
As time goes on and the changes keep happening in equations that are used to rank the website on Search Engines Result Pages (SERPs), the websites that are on top of the ranking game and want to remain there are also altering and improving themselves. But the change happening at a great speed has its’ consequences and Redirect Chain is one of them.
What usually happens is that we get so caught up in making our website suitable to survive the Google algorithms like Penguin and Hummingbird that we forget to take care of the mess we created in the first place in order for all the necessary changes to take place.
Redirecting is the process of sending a user to the web page the originally requested but since the page was altered and now exists with a new but slightly different URL, the user is sent to the new and fully functioning webpage that will remain there permanently.
If you visit a page and it was moved to a different location, the website will notify you by giving you the URL of the current location with an addition of 301 in it. This three-digit code also accompanies the users in the process of being redirected to a new location of the page. It contains the header tags which in turn helps in relocating.
The oldest location in the Redirect Chain is called the Initial URL and the newest one is marked as the Destination URL. When the process of redirecting is long and contains more stops in between the first and the final URL, a chain is automatically created between the two endpoints. It is considered a chain when the number of redirects is more than one.
Even two redirects constitute a chain. Even though this is an effective method of saving your incoming traffic from directing somewhere else, meaning some other website, it is important to keep the number of redirects as swift as possible so the users would not even get to know. But if the redirect chains come in the way of your loading time and other similar functions, it must be resolved before you start losing your incoming traffic.