Glossary
Redirect chain
A redirect chain is a sequence of two or more redirects between the URL a visitor requested and the page finally served.
Updated 2 Sept 2026
In detail
Chains occur legitimately — HTTP to HTTPS, then non-www to www, then a renamed path — and maliciously, when injected code hops a visitor through several intermediaries before landing on an affiliate or malware page. Each hop costs latency, and long chains complicate diagnosis because the harmful destination is several steps away from the URL that appeared in search results.
Why it matters
For legitimate sites, chains waste crawl budget and can weaken signal consolidation between the requested URL and the final one. For compromised sites, chains are an evasion tactic: the intermediate hops rotate frequently, so blocklists and manual checks trail behind the current destination.
Examples
- http://example.com → https://example.com → https://www.example.com → https://www.example.com/home (three unnecessary hops).
- A search visitor sent through two ad-network domains before reaching a counterfeit storefront.
- A JavaScript redirect that fires only when document.referrer contains a search engine hostname.