A -> B -> C -> D. That Is Three Redirects Before Your User Sees Anything.
Each redirect in a chain adds 50-300ms of latency. Three redirects? That could be a full second of wait time before the page even starts loading.
And Google is watching.
How Redirect Chains Form
They accumulate over time. You redesign your site and redirect old URLs to new ones. Then you redesign again and redirect the new URLs to newer ones. Nobody goes back and updates the original redirects.
Five years and three redesigns later, you have redirect chains four or five hops deep. This is exactly why redirect mapping during site migrations is so critical.
The SEO Impact
Speed. Every redirect is a round-trip to the server. Multiple redirects compound the latency.
Link equity loss. Google has said that 301 redirects pass PageRank. But there is evidence that long chains dilute some equity at each hop. Ahrefs covers this in their technical SEO guide.
Crawl budget waste. Googlebot has to follow every hop, using crawl budget on redirects instead of actual content.
How to Fix Them
Crawl your site with Screaming Frog or a similar tool. Find all redirect chains (any redirect with more than one hop). Update each redirect to point directly to the final destination.
Old URL -> Final URL. One hop. Done.
Prevention
When setting up new redirects, always check if the target URL itself redirects. If it does, skip the middle step and redirect directly to the final destination. Run a redirect audit quarterly to keep chains from forming.
Track redirect health in our 113-task SEO checklist. Free. No credit card. 30 seconds.