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Entrovix AI

Redirect Checker

Follows a redirect chain hop by hop with status codes and timings, and flags the specific mistakes that cost rankings — temporary redirects, needless chains, and redirects to the home page.

Follow a redirect chain

Every hop, its status code and how long it took — including the hops a browser hides from you.

Need this as an API?
Why use it

Built to be genuinely useful

Every hop, with timing

The full chain your browser hides, including how long each round trip took.

302 where 301 was meant

A temporary redirect signals the old URL should stay indexed rather than being replaced.

Catches the cPanel double hop

http→https then non-www→www as two separate rules — everywhere on shared hosting.

Flags redirects to the home page

Google's documentation describes these as soft 404s, so the redirect is not treated as a move.

How it works

Three steps

  1. 1

    Enter the URL to follow.

  2. 2

    See every hop with its status code.

  3. 3

    Read what each problem costs you.

301 and 302 are not interchangeable

A 301 says this has moved permanently: replace the old URL with the new one in the index. A 302 says the move is temporary: keep the old URL indexed. Google has said all 30x redirects pass PageRank, so the difference is which URL is indexed rather than whether value carries across.

Choosing wrong is invisible. A migration done entirely with 302s looks perfect in a browser — every link goes to the right place — while Google may keep the old URLs in its index rather than swapping them for the new ones, so the pages you want ranked are not the ones listed.

This is one of the most common causes of a redesign losing traffic, and it survives because both codes work identically for a human visitor. Nothing except a checker will tell you.

Chains, and the Indian hosting default

Every hop is a full round trip before anything renders. Two hops on a mobile connection is a noticeable delay before the first byte of the actual page arrives, and Google stops following after roughly five.

The chain almost every site on shared hosting has: http://example.com → https://example.com → https://www.example.com. Two rules, added at different times by different people, each doing one job. Every visitor arriving from an old link, a printed URL or a WhatsApp forward pays both.

The fix is one rule going straight from http://example.com to https://www.example.com, keeping the intermediate rules for anything that still links to them. This tool detects the pattern specifically because it is so nearly universal.

Redirecting to the home page throws the value away

When a page is removed, the tempting move is to redirect it to the home page so nobody hits a 404. It feels tidy and it is usually the wrong call.

Google's documentation describes a redirect to an unrelated page — and the home page is unrelated to almost any specific page — as a soft 404, so it is not honoured as a move. The visitor arriving from a search for something specific also lands on a general page and leaves.

Redirect to the closest genuine equivalent instead. If there isn't one, returning 404 or 410 is more honest: Google drops the URL cleanly, and the rest of the site is judged on its own merits rather than on a pile of misleading redirects.

FAQ

Questions people ask

API access

Need Redirect Checking in Your Application?

Run redirect checking automatically across your own pages or client sites through API access.

Tell us what you are building, how you plan to use it and the volume you expect. We will come back to you with availability, integration details and a quote for your usage.

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