Skip to main content
Detects multi-hop redirect chains that waste crawl budget
Rule IDcrawl/redirect-chain
CategoryCrawl
ScopeSite-wide
Severitywarning
Weight5/10

​
Solution

Each redirect hop adds latency and consumes crawl budget. Search engines may stop following after 5+ hops. Consolidate redirect chains to a single hop by updating the source URL to point directly to the final destination. Common causes: HTTP→HTTPS→www→trailing slash combinations, or legacy domain migrations.

​
Options

This rule supports the following configuration options:
OptionTypeDefaultDescription
maxHopsnumber2Flag redirect chains exceeding this many hops

​
Configuration Example

squirrel.toml
[rule_options."crawl/redirect-chain"]
maxHops = 3  # Allow up to 3 hops before flagging

​
Enable / Disable

​
Disable this rule

squirrel.toml
[rules]
disable = ["crawl/redirect-chain"]

​
Disable all Crawl rules

squirrel.toml
[rules]
disable = ["crawl/*"]

​
Enable only this rule

squirrel.toml
[rules]
enable = ["crawl/redirect-chain"]
disable = ["*"]