- Class
- C1 Mechanism
- Weight
- 8
- Severity on fail
- critical
- Applies to
Test this rule on a live site with the redirect checker. Free, no account needed.
Scope and evidence
Evaluated on redirect units that are not members of I. The book marks this requirement SEARCH-ENGINE-SPECIFIC.
Members of I are excluded because SEO-HTTP-01 already blocks them.
Fail conditions
Each condition has a stable code and a reason template. The evaluator fills the placeholders from observed values only; no sentence in a report is generated.
loop{source} redirects in a loop ({chain}), so it never resolves.
too_many_hops{source} needs more than 10 redirects ({chain}). Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops, so this URL never resolves for Google.
The documented fix
Point every source directly at its final destination and remove the rule that creates the cycle.
Sources, quoted
These are the passages the rule rests on, stored once in the knowledge base and emitted exactly as written. A citation marked for specific conditions appears only on findings with those codes.
“By default, Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops.”
[G-HTTP] How HTTP status codes, and network and DNS errors affect Google Search · 3xx (redirection) · last updated 2026-02-04
https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/troubleshooting/http-status-codes“While Googlebot can follow up to 10 hops in a "chain" of multiple redirects (for example, Page 1 > Page 2 > Page 3), we advise redirecting to the final destination directly.”
[G-SITEMOVE] Site moves with URL changes · Avoid chaining redirects · last updated 2026-08-20
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes
Related rules
- SEO-HTTP-01Intended URLs return HTTP 200