: The crawler will probably "see" the intermediate URLs insofar as going there and then being redirected again, but it won't actually care about or store/index them, as that's the entire point

@Kristi941

The crawler will probably "see" the intermediate URLs insofar as going there and then being redirected again, but it won't actually care about or store/index them, as that's the entire point of the 301: you're telling it that URL is no longer valid and to go look elsewhere.

Last June, Matt Cutts did a video with SEOMoz where redirect chains were specifically brought up ~10:00, summarized as:


Matt was very clear that Google can and usually will deal with one or two redirects in a series, but three is pushing it and anything beyond that probably won't be followed.


...though elsewhere he's quoted as saying at a PubCon that Google would follow up to ten of them. (I wouldn't try and find out.) And here's another post that mentions Bing–now also powering Yahoo–have at some point said they don't like it, either.

All that said, you should ultimately work toward getting rid of the intermediate steps altogether.

Vote Up Vote Down

Login to post a comment!