Free Redirect Checker
Follows a URL one hop at a time and shows every step: the status code, where it points next, and what each hop says about itself in its headers. A browser hides all of this by showing you only where you landed.
Each hop is fetched separately with redirects turned off, so the status and headers of every step survive. Nothing is stored.
Why the middle of a chain is invisible
Open a redirecting URL in a browser and you see the destination. That is the browser doing its job, and it is also why chains quietly grow: nothing about the experience changes when a two-hop redirect becomes a five-hop one, so nobody finds out until they go looking. The statuses and headers in between exist only in responses nobody reads.
This tool fetches each step with redirects turned off, records what came back, then follows the Location header itself. That is the only way the intermediate responses survive, and every judgement below is made from them rather than from the final page.
The four redirect codes that matter
301, permanent
The standard permanent move. Search engines index the destination and drop the old URL. Passes value.
308, permanent
301 without the historical quirk of letting a POST become a GET. Same meaning for search, rarer in the wild, correct if your tooling emits it.
302, temporary
Says the move is not final, so the ORIGINAL URL should stay indexed. Passes value, and is still the wrong status for a permanent move: it is a request to keep the URL you were trying to retire.
307, temporary
302 with the method preserved. Same indexing meaning. Common in front of HSTS, where the browser itself is the one redirecting.
Anything else in a chain (a 303, a meta refresh, a JavaScript location assignment) is worth a second look, because its handling is less settled and varies between crawlers. This tool reports the status it saw rather than smoothing it into one of the four.
The hop that asks not to be followed
This is the check that does not exist in other redirect tools, and the reason this page is here. A redirect can carry an X-Robots-Tag header just as a page can, and if that header says nofollow, or none (which is shorthand for noindex plus nofollow), the hop is asking crawlers not to follow it.
Where this bites: a directory routes its outbound button through its own short domain to count clicks. On the listing page the anchor looks like an ordinary link with no nofollow anywhere near it, so it reads as a clean dofollow backlink to a person and to any tool that checks rel. The refusal is one layer down, in a response nobody fetches.
Two honest caveats, because this is the kind of finding that gets repeated as fact. Google does not document what a robots directive does to a redirect specifically, so nobody can tell you with certainty that the value is severed; this tool counts it as passing nothing because that is the cautious reading, and it says so on the result rather than in a footnote. And a bare noindex on a hop is NOT treated as blocking here: noindex governs whether the hop itself gets indexed, which is normal and harmless for a link shortener.
What this checker looks for
Chain length
One hop is normal, two usually means two rules that could be one, and Google follows about ten before treating the URL as an error. Every hop is latency on every request.
Loops
A URL redirecting back to one already visited never resolves, and is reported outright rather than hidden behind a timeout.
Robots directives per hop
nofollow or none in an X-Robots-Tag, as described above.
Temporary statuses
302 or 307 in a chain that looks permanent, which quietly keeps the old URL in the index.
Two hops for one fix
The http to https correction and the www prefix handled in separate steps. Extremely common, entirely avoidable, and one rule collapses it.
Where it lands
Whether the chain actually reaches a 200. A chain ending at 404 means every link pointing into it leads nowhere, which is the worst case and the easiest to miss.
Redirects and your backlinks
Two situations are worth separating, because the advice differs:
- Redirects on your own site. When you move a page, 301 it and point the old URL directly at the final one. The value carries over. The mistake to avoid is a chain built one migration at a time, where each move adds a hop to a path nobody re-checks.
- Redirects on the site linking to you. You control none of it, and it decides what your backlink is worth. A directory that starts routing its outbound links through a counter has changed the nature of every link it gave you, and nothing on the listing page will look different.
The second is why a backlink checker that only reads the anchor gives wrong answers in both directions: it calls a live listing missing when the anchor points at a hop, and it calls a link clean when the hop it travels through refuses to be followed. To read the anchor itself, the dofollow link checker reports rel and indexability together.
Honest limits
This follows server-side redirects: the ones expressed as a status code and a Location header. It does not execute JavaScript, so a redirect performed by a script in the page is not visible here, and it does not currently parse meta refresh tags. The walk stops at twelve hops, two past what Google follows, so a longer chain is reported as truncated rather than pretended to be complete. Requests come from our servers, so a site that redirects differently by geography, cookie or user agent may behave differently for you.
It also reads what the chain does, not why. A hop carrying a blocking header may be deliberate policy or an accident of a link shortener’s defaults, and this tool cannot tell you which. It can only tell you it is there, which is more than you had.
You can check one chain. You cannot watch forty of them.
Where a directory points its outbound link is its decision, and it can change any week without touching the page you look at. ShipDR resolves the hop on every listing you track, reads what each one says about itself, and reports the day a link stops passing what it used to.
- Every listing rechecked on a schedule, not once
- Live, dofollow and indexable, read from the page itself
- Told the day a backlink drops or flips
Adding a website and charting its Domain Rating is free, no card. The backlink engine is $10 once, per website, with no subscription.
Fair questions
What is a redirect chain?
More than one redirect between the URL somebody requested and the page they end up on: A sends them to B, B sends them to C. Each step is a separate request and response. A browser hides all of it, showing only the final page, which is why chains grow for years without anyone noticing.
Do redirects pass link value?
Yes. Google has stated that all redirect types pass PageRank, including temporary ones, and the old advice about losing a fixed percentage through a 301 is long out of date. What still costs you is everything around it: latency on every request, crawl budget spent walking the chain, and the chance that something in the middle of it is broken or asks not to be followed.
How many redirects is too many?
One is normal. Two usually means two rules that could be one. Google follows up to about ten hops in a single crawl attempt and treats anything past that as an error, so ten is the hard ceiling rather than a target. The practical rule: point the first URL directly at the last one, and the chain stops being a question.
What is the difference between 301 and 302?
301 and 308 are permanent, and they tell search engines to index the destination and forget the old URL. 302 and 307 are temporary, and they tell search engines to keep the OLD URL indexed because the move is not final. Both pass value. Using a 302 for a permanent move is the common mistake: nothing appears broken, and the URL you wanted to retire keeps being the one in the index.
Can a redirect be nofollowed?
A hop can carry an X-Robots-Tag header with nofollow or none, and that is the case this tool was built to surface. Google does not document what a robots directive does to a redirect specifically, so nobody can tell you with certainty that the value is severed. What is certain is that the hop is asking not to be followed, so this checker counts it as passing nothing and says outright that it is the conservative read rather than a measurement.
Why does my backlink checker say the link does not exist?
Very likely because the site routes its outbound clicks through a redirect it controls, usually to count them. The anchor on the page then points at that hop rather than at your domain, so a tool reading hrefs concludes the page never mentioned you. The listing is live and the link may be passing full value. Resolving that is one HEAD request per candidate, which is what ShipDR does before it will call a listing missing.
Does a redirect chain hurt rankings directly?
Not by itself, and it is worth being precise instead of alarming. A short chain of permanent redirects to a working page is close to harmless. The damage comes from the failure modes chains hide: a hop that 404s, a loop, a temporary status left on a permanent move, a blocking robots header, or enough hops that a crawler gives up. Every one of those is invisible in a browser, and every one is visible in the list of hops.