Free Redirect Checker

It shows the full path from the URL you enter to the page that finally answers, and whether that page can rank. Each hop lists its status code, the URL requested, the Location it pointed to and the time the server took to answer.

• Chains: more than one redirect before the final page.
• Temporary redirects (302, 303 and 307) where a permanent one is almost always meant, such as a move from http to https.
• A move from https back to http, and an http URL that never moves to https.
• A chain that switches between www and non-www more than once.
• A deep URL redirected to the homepage, which Google often treats as a soft 404.
• Loops, with the hops that loop named, and the final page's own status code.

The checker sends one honest user agent and no cookies, so it sees what an anonymous visitor's browser would request. A site that blocks bots may answer it differently from Googlebot; when the final page answers 403 or 429, the result says so.

Every response starts with a three-digit status code, and the first digit gives its class: 2xx means success, 3xx a redirect, 4xx a problem with the request and 5xx a problem on the server. The checker shows the code and its name for every hop.

Google says it follows up to 10 redirect hops, and this checker stops at the same point. A URL that needs more never reaches a page that can be indexed.

Use a 301 or 308 when the old URL is gone for good, which covers almost every redirect a site makes: http to https, www to non-www, a renamed page or a merged article. Use a 302 or 307 only when the old URL is coming back, such as a short sale page or a maintenance screen.

Google does pass signals through a 302 that stays in place for a long time, but it decides on its own when that happens, and until then it can keep the old URL in results. A 301 removes the guesswork, which is why the checker warns on every temporary redirect it finds.

A redirect chain is a URL that redirects to another URL that redirects again. The usual cause is layers of history: http moved to https years ago, then www was dropped, then the page was renamed, and each change added a hop instead of updating the ones before it.

1. Note the final URL the checker reports.
2. Change the first redirect so it points straight at that final URL, and do the same for any redirect in between.
3. Update internal links, the sitemap and canonicals so they use the final URL and need no redirect at all.
4. Run the checker again: the first URL should show one hop, then a 200.

Each hop is another request for the browser and the crawler, so long chains slow pages down and use crawl time on URLs that hold no content. This checker follows at most 10 redirects, then reports the chain as too long.

A noindex directive tells search engines to leave a page out of their results, and it can sit in two places: an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, or a robots meta tag in the page's head. The checker reads both on the final page and names the one that set it.

• X-Robots-Tag: noindex in the response headers, including a version scoped to googlebot.
• <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> in the HTML, which applies to every search engine.
• <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">, which applies to Google only.
• none, which means noindex and nofollow together.

A stray noindex is one of the most common reasons a page vanishes from Google. It often arrives with a staging template, a plugin setting or a header added at the server, and it stays invisible because nothing on the page looks different. A noindex in robots.txt does nothing: Google stopped reading it in 2019.

A canonical tag names the URL a page wants search engines to index when the same content can be reached at more than one address. The checker reads the canonical from both the HTML and the Link HTTP header and reports where it points.

• A canonical that points at the page itself, which is what most pages should have.
• A canonical that points somewhere else, which tells Google not to rank this URL.
• More than one canonical URL, which Google ignores and replaces with its own choice.
• A relative canonical such as /page instead of a full https address, which works but can be misread on copied pages.
• A canonical that points at a redirect or an error page. The checker requests the canonical URL once to see its status.

Google treats a canonical as a strong hint, not an order. When the canonical points at a redirect, a 404 or a page with different content, Google picks a canonical itself, and it may not pick the one you want.