How redirects stack friction into crawl flow
A redirect chain is a path of dominos: visiting example.com redirects to www.example.com, which redirects to example.com/new-location, which finally lands on the target URL. Each hop costs time (milliseconds per redirect, milliseconds per DNS lookup for a new domain) and crawl budget: Google has a fixed budget of URLs to crawl per site per day. A site that burns budget on redirect chains crawls fewer unique pages.
From a PageRank perspective, redirects pass authority onward but with a sliver of loss at each hop. A page receiving a backlink through a two-hop redirect gets roughly 95% of the link value it would receive directly; three hops drops to 90%. Chains longer than three hops become visually obvious in authority loss.
Fixing redirect sprawl
Consolidating URL structures eliminates chains: if www, non-www, and /index.html variants all existed at one point, canonicalize to a single version and redirect everything directly to it. Audit with crawl logs and tools that trace redirect paths; chains of two or more hops are candidates for immediate cleanup. A mature site often has legacy redirects from domain migrations, platform changes, and old marketing URLs; auditing every six months finds chains created by recent changes.