Cadena de redirecciones

Nobody builds one deliberately. They accumulate in layers, and the classic example needs no bad decisions at all:

• The site moves to HTTPS. http:// now redirects to https://.
• It drops the www. Another hop.
• A post is renamed two years later. A third.
• The category structure changes. A fourth.

Each step was correct in isolation. Together they mean a request for the original address travels through four redirects before anything is delivered. A redirect loop is the pathological version: A points to B, B points back to A, and the browser gives up.

Less than the folklore suggests, but not nothing. Google has said 301 redirects pass essentially all link equity and that it will follow up to about five hops in a single pass. Beyond that it stops and comes back later, if at all.

The real costs are more mundane: latency — every hop is a full round trip, felt most on mobile connections; crawl budget — each hop is a request returning no content; and fragility — a chain of four breaks the moment one enlace in it is removed by someone who did not know the rest existed.

First, update the internal links. This is the step people skip. A redirect exists for visitors arriving from outside — old bookmarks, external links, search results. Your own pages should point at the final URL directly. An internal link that goes through a redirect is a link you control pointing at an address you know is wrong.

Then flatten the chain. Rewrite every rule so each old URL points straight at the final destination, not at the next old URL. Keep the intermediate rules — removing them breaks anything still requesting those addresses.

Then check for loops. Any crawler reports them; they are always a bug.

Screaming Frog lists chains under Reports › Redirects › Redirect Chains, with the full hop sequence and the final status code.