How to Audit Redirect Chains Without Screaming Frog

Redirect chains are silent killers. They waste crawl budget, slow pages, and split link equity. Here’s how to find and prune them without Screaming Frog.

What a redirect chain looks like

/old-page → 301 → /new-page → 301 → /final-page

Google follows the chain, but each hop loses a fraction of PageRank. Three hops = meaningful signal loss.

The free audit (no tools)

1. Export all 3xx responses from your server logs.
2. For each, follow the chain to its end (the final 200).
3. Count the hops.
4. Any chain over 2 hops needs fixing.

The free audit (with curl)

curl -sI -L https://example.com/old-page | grep -i location

This shows the chain. Repeat for every URL with a known redirect.

The free audit (with spreadsheets)

1. Pull 3xx URLs from your audit tool or logs.
2. In a spreadsheet, column A: source URL. Column B: first redirect target. Column C: next target. Continue until you reach 200.
3. Sort by hop count. Top of the list = highest priority fixes.

The fix

Replace any chain with a single 301 from source to final target. Update internal links to point at the final URL. Remove the intermediate redirect.

The CMS angle

WordPress, Shopify, and most CMSs accumulate redirects over years. Bulk-redirect imports miss edge cases. Audit your redirects quarterly.

How often

Quarterly. After any major migration. After every CMS update.