Redirect Checker

How to use it

Follow Location headers and check status codes. Prefer one 301/308 hop to the final URL — long chains waste crawl budget and dilute equity. Redirect Checker is part of the SEOheist tool hub: fast, free micro-utilities that help you ship cleaner technical SEO without opening another bloated SaaS tab. Start with the interactive workbench above, then use this guide as the editorial checklist when you productionize the same checks in your CMS or CI. What this tool is for. Follow redirect chains and spot loops or soft 404s. Use it when you are auditing a single URL, briefing a writer, or validating a template change before it hits production. The goal is actionable signal in under a minute — not a 40-page PDF. How to work the loop. Paste or fetch your input, read the structured output, and fix the highest-severity issue first (indexation blockers, broken canonicals, redirect chains, thin titles). Re-run after each change so you can see whether the page improved. When something looks wrong, open the live HTML source and confirm your CMS did not inject a second title, a staging noindex, or a conflicting CDN header. Quality bar. Prefer canonical HTTPS URLs, self-consistent internal links, and copy that matches the SERP promise above the fold. Structured data should mirror visible content. Robots and sitemap rules should describe reality, not wishful thinking. If a check fails because of JavaScript-only rendering, fall back to your server HTML or a rendered snapshot — many free fetchers only see the first response body. Where it fits in a heist workflow. Run board listings through these tools before you stake a claim, and re-check after design or plugin updates. Pair the output with Heist Score, /go click tracking, and guest swaps so technical hygiene and distribution stay in the same loop. Keep FAQs on-page when you publish companion guides so rich-result eligibility stays honest. Reference notes. 301 vs 302? Use 301/308 for permanent moves; 302/307 for temporary. How many hops are OK? Ideally one. More than two is a smell. Do redirects pass PageRank? Mostly yes for 301/308, but chains still lose efficiency. Treat every number (title length, hop count, word count) as a heuristic, not a Google ranking factor. When in doubt, choose clarity for humans and leave crawl budget for pages that deserve it.