Redirect Chain Analyzer — HTTP 3xx Hop Tracer

Search engines consume crawl budget following redirects. Long chains slow indexing and dilute PageRank flow. Marketing teams paste campaign short links and need to verify they land on correct HTTPS product pages without unexpected intermediate domains.

Our analyzer documents each hop for SEO tickets — proving whether http:// redirects to https:// apex in one step or three — and giving developers exact status codes to fix.

301 Moved Permanently signals lasting URL change — browsers and caches remember aggressively. 302 and 307 are temporary — semantics differ on whether method must stay POST across hop. 308 permanent redirect preserves method like 307. 303 See Other often follows POST with GET to result page.

Listing codes per hop helps distinguish misconfigured permanent redirects causing cache pain from intentional temporary maintenance redirects.

open-redirect-checker appends malicious destination parameters to test whether an application reflects unsafe external URLs — a security vulnerability assessment. redirect-chain-analyzer innocently follows whatever legitimate chain the server returns from a single starting URL you provide.

Use open-redirect-checker during security audits. Use redirect-chain-analyzer during SEO migrations, CDN rule verification, and marketing link QA.

Servers may return Location: /login or full https:// URLs. We resolve relative paths against the prior hop URL so you see the actual next request target without manual concatenation errors.

Protocol-relative URLs and uppercase schemes normalize for consistent chain display.

Infinite redirect loops between www and apex versions trap naive clients. We cap maximum hops and report truncation so runaway chains do not exhaust resources. Loop patterns appear as repeating URLs in the hop table — fix server config rather than raising limits.

Document truncated chains in tickets with last seen hop when requesting infrastructure fixes.

Chains through login gateways may stop at 302 to sign-in when our unauthenticated fetch lacks session cookies. Results show the login redirect — not failure — interpret accordingly when tracing authenticated-only paths.

Test public marketing entry URLs for accurate chain representation.

Single-page apps and legacy pages using window.location or meta refresh tags do not emit HTTP 3xx. This tool sees only HTTP-level redirects. Use browser devtools Network tab for client-side hops or website-technology-detector for stack hints.

Do not conclude no redirect exists when HTTP chain is length one but page still navigates — check client-side code.

Total elapsed time includes network RTT and TLS for every hop. Slow chains may indicate geographically distant redirect middleware or DNS latency on each new host. Compare before and after CDN rule changes.

Pair with ping-test on redirect hostnames when isolating network versus application delay — authorized targets only.

First hop may be HTTP 301 to HTTPS. Subsequent hops might enforce apex canonicalization. security-headers-checker and hsts-preload-checker complement redirect analysis when hardening transport.

Document expected versus actual chain after certificate renewals or domain consolidation projects.

Only trace URLs you own or may fetch per policy. Automated repeated tracing of third-party sites may violate terms. Our fetch layer blocks internal network targets to reduce SSRF abuse — public URLs only.

Do not use redirect traces to map private infrastructure without authorization.