Redirect Error (GSC Status)

What the "Redirect error" status in Google Search Console's Page Indexing report means — Google's four causes (chain too long, loop, max URL length, bad/empty URL), how it differs from the normal "Page with redirect," and how to diagnose and fix it.

First published: Jun 23, 2026 · Last updated: Jul 19, 2026 · Advanced
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"Redirect error" is a Google Search Console Page Indexing status that means Googlebot couldn't follow a redirect for the URL, so the page wasn't indexed. Google names four causes: a redirect chain that was too long, a redirect loop, a redirect URL that exceeded the max URL length, or a bad/empty URL in the chain. It's a broken redirect you must fix — and it's different from "Page with redirect," a normal working redirect. Diagnose by tracing the chain, then pick the fix that matches the intended behavior. Google's current docs publish a 10-hop ceiling and recommend no more than 3/fewer than 5 when chains are unavoidable. Mueller's dated 2014 and 2020 statements describe roughly five hops per crawl; the 2014 statement also described continuing the remainder later. Treat those as historical representative guidance, not a current scheduling guarantee. Patrick's roughly five-hop cutoff is an independent practitioner threshold. Aim for one hop regardless.

TL;DR — “Redirect errorA Google Search Console Page Indexing status meaning Googlebot couldn't follow a redirect — a chain too long, a loop, a URL over the max length, or a bad/empty URL in the chain. It's a broken redirect to fix, not the normal \"Page with redirect.\"” is a Google Search ConsoleA free Google service that reports how a site performs in Google Search and surfaces problems with how Google crawls, indexes, and serves it. It's first-party data straight from Google — but you don't need it to appear in results. Page IndexingThe Google Search Console report (formerly Index Coverage) showing how many of your URLs are indexed vs. not indexed, and grouping the not-indexed ones by reason. status: GooglebotGooglebot is Google's web crawler — the software that fetches pages so Google can index and rank them. It comes in two variants, Googlebot Smartphone (primary, under mobile-first indexing) and Googlebot Desktop, and runs an evergreen Chromium renderer. tried to follow a redirectA redirect sends browsers and crawlers from a requested URL to a different one. An HTTP redirect specifically is a 3xx status code paired with a Location header; meta refresh and JavaScript redirects achieve a similar navigation without being a 3xx response themselves. Permanent redirects (301/308) are Google's signal the target should be canonical; temporary ones (302/303/307) aren't. and couldn’t resolve it, so the page isn’t indexedStoring a crawled page in the search index so it can appear in results. Crawled is not the same as indexed — Google selects what to keep, and indexing isn't guaranteed.. Google names four causes — a redirect chainA → B → C instead of A → C. Each hop loses link equity and adds latency. that was too long, a redirect loopA redirect loop is a chain of redirects that circles back on itself instead of ever reaching a live page — URL A redirects to B and B redirects back to A (or a longer cycle). No page ever returns a 200, so browsers show ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS and crawlers can't index anything., a redirect URL that exceeded the max URL length, or a bad/empty URL in the chain. It is a broken redirect to fix, and it is distinct from “Page with redirectA Google Search Console Page Indexing status for a URL that redirects elsewhere. It's not indexed by design because it's a redirect — the destination is a separate question, and Google says the target may or may not end up indexed — usually expected, not an error (unlike the separate \"Redirect error\").,” which is a working, non-canonical redirect that’s normal and usually needs no action. Diagnose by tracing the chain (curl -IL, URL InspectionA Google Search Console feature that reports how Google sees one specific URL on a property you own. By default it shows the last-indexed snapshot; a separate \"Test live URL\" mode fetches the current version., LighthouseLighthouse is Google's free, open-source tool that audits a page under simulated lab conditions and scores it 0–100 across Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. It's lab data — useful for debugging, not a ranking signal., a crawlerA crawler — also called a spider or bot — is an automated program that fetches web pages, extracts their links, and queues new URLs to visit. Search engines use crawlers to discover and download content for their index.), collapse it to a single direct 301 to the final URL, fix internal linksAn internal link is a hyperlink from one page on a website to another page on the same website. Internal links help search engines discover your pages and pass ranking signals (PageRank and anchor-text context) between them., and run Validate Fix. On hop limits: current Google docs publish a 10-hop ceiling and recommend no more than 3/fewer than 5. Mueller’s dated 2014 and 2020 statements describe about five per crawl; the 2014 one also described continuing the remainder later. Patrick’s similar observations are independent. Aim for one hop regardless.

Where this status lives

“Redirect error” appears in Search ConsoleGoogle's free tool for monitoring crawling, indexing, and search performance. under Page IndexingStoring a crawled page in the search index so it can appear in results. Crawled is not the same as indexed — Google selects what to keep, and indexing isn't guaranteed. → “Why pages aren’t indexed.” That table breaks the not-indexed URLs into reasons, and this is one of them. The takeaway up front: it’s a crawl/follow failure, not a quality judgment. Google isn’t telling you the page is low-quality or penalized — it’s telling you it literally couldn’t follow the redirect to a destination, so there was nothing to index.

Google’s four causes — exactly

These are Search Console’s documented report causes, not a universal taxonomy for every redirect implementation bug. Evidence for this claim Google reports Redirect error when it could not process a redirect to a destination. Scope: Google Search Console report terminology and documented Search behavior; the label alone may not prove the underlying root cause. Confidence: high · Verified: Google: Page indexing report Google separately recommends short, direct redirect paths. Evidence for this claim Google lists overly long chains, loops, excessive redirect URL length, and bad or empty redirect URLs for this report status. Scope: Google Search Console report terminology and documented Search behavior; the label alone may not prove the underlying root cause. Confidence: high · Verified: Google: Page indexing report

Google’s Page Indexing documentation is specific. A redirect error means Google experienced one of the following: a redirect chain that was too long, a redirect loop, a redirect URL that eventually exceeded the max URL length, or a bad or empty URL in the redirect chainA → B → C instead of A → C. Each hop loses link equity and adds latency.. That’s the whole list — four failure modes, and every fix maps back to one of them. (The exact wording is in the Quotes tab.)

”Redirect error” vs “Page with redirect” — the contrast that matters most

This is the single most common confusion in the topic, so it’s worth being blunt about it. These are two different Page Indexing statuses:

  • Redirect error — Google couldn’t follow the redirect (one of the four causes above). The page can’t be indexed. It’s broken; fix it.
  • Page with redirectA Google Search Console Page Indexing status for a URL that redirects elsewhere. It's not indexed by design because it's a redirect — the destination is a separate question, and Google says the target may or may not end up indexed — usually expected, not an error (unlike the separate \"Redirect error\"). — Google could follow the redirect; it worked. The URL is simply a non-canonical URL that redirects elsewhere, so this URL won’t be indexed — but the target might be. Google’s own description of it is that it’s a non-canonical URL that redirects to another page, so it won’t be indexed, while the target URL of the redirect might or might not be indexed depending on what Google thinks of that target. This is not an error and usually needs no action.

If your old URLs that you intentionally 301-redirected show up as “Page with redirect,” that’s the system working as designed — don’t go trying to “fix” it. Save your attention for “Redirect error,” which is the one that’s actually broken. (There’s a side-by-side table in the Cheat Sheets tab.)

The four causes, and how to fix each

1. Redirect chain that was too long. A → B → C → D → … instead of A straight to the final URL. Each hop adds latency and another chance for something to break, and a long enough chain means Google doesn’t reach the destination. Fix: collapse the chain. Point the original URL directly at the final destination in a single 301, and remove or update the intermediate rules.

2. Redirect loopA redirect loop is a chain of redirects that circles back on itself instead of ever reaching a live page — URL A redirects to B and B redirects back to A (or a longer cycle). No page ever returns a 200, so browsers show ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS and crawlers can't index anything.. Two or more URLs that redirect back to each other — A → B → A, or a longer cycle. In a browser this is the classic ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS / “too many redirects” error; Google flags the same root cause. Loops usually come from conflicting rules — HTTP↔HTTPSHTTPS is the encrypted version of HTTP — it uses TLS to authenticate the server and protect data in transit between a browser and a website. Google announced it as a lightweight ranking signal in 2014 and today conditionally prefers HTTPS pages as canonical; Chrome marks plain HTTP pages 'Not Secure.', www↔non-www, or trailing-slash↔no-slash rules fighting each other. Fix: find the cycle, decide on the single canonical form (e.g. HTTPS, non-www, trailing slashA trailing slash is the forward slash (/) at the end of a URL — example.com/page/ versus example.com/page. Except at the bare root domain, the two versions are different URLs to search engines, so you pick one format and enforce it. — pick one of each), and make every rule point one direction only.

3. Redirect URL exceeded the max URL length. A redirect that keeps appending to the URL — faulty rewrite rules, runaway query/tracking parameters, or a rule that re-feeds its own output — can grow the target URL past the length limit. This often overlaps with a loop. Fix: find the rule that’s appending parameters and stop it; strip unnecessary tracking params from the redirect target; redirect to a clean, fixed final URL.

4. Bad or empty URL in the redirect chain. Google’s own wording here is generic — a “bad or empty URL” — and it doesn’t name relative URLs as an example. A relative Location value is valid HTTP (the spec has recipients resolve it against the current URL), so relativity by itself isn’t the problem. What actually breaks a hop: an empty Location, a value that doesn’t resolve to any real URL, or a rule that emits garbage instead of a usable target. Fix: trace the hop and confirm exactly what the broken Location value is, then correct the rule so it emits a valid, resolvable target — absolute is the safer default, but the defect is “doesn’t resolve,” not “isn’t absolute.”

How many redirects does Google actually follow?

This is where bad numbers get repeated, so I want to be careful — and this section changed since I last checked it. Google’s crawlingCrawling is how search engines use automated bots (like Googlebot and Bingbot) to discover URLs and download pages. A page has to be crawlable to be indexed, but crawling on its own isn't a ranking factor.-infrastructure documentation now publishes a default: “By default, Google’s crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops. However, specific products’ crawlers may have different limits.” It adds that GooglebotGooglebot is Google's web crawler — the software that fetches pages so Google can index and rank them. It comes in two variants, Googlebot Smartphone (primary, under mobile-first indexing) and Googlebot Desktop, and runs an evergreen Chromium renderer. generally follows 10 redirect hops when crawling for general web content, but Google Inspection Tools doesn’t follow redirects at all — so the number even depends on which Google tool is doing the fetching.

Google’s current site-move documentation adds the practical target: avoid chains; if that isn’t possible, keep them to no more than 3 and fewer than 5. That is not another technical ceiling. Ten is what the current crawler documentation says Googlebot can follow; 3-to-5 is the current implementation recommendation.

The familiar five-hop number has a separate, dated evidence trail. In a 2014 webmaster hangout at 46:03, John Mueller described Googlebot following as many as five redirects in one crawl and continuing any remainder in the next crawl. In 2020 he separately said Google follows up to about 5 hops per crawl attempt, and advised fewer than 5 for URLs that are crawled frequently. The 2014 continuation statement was real, not an invented breakdown. But both statements are historical representative guidance; neither is a current guarantee that every long chain will resume, or when.

My own practical cutoff, from years of fixing these, is also around 5 hops, and I’ve independently seen Google pick longer chains back up. Those are practitioner observations, not the basis for Mueller’s 2014 statement and not a platform limit.

None of this changes the practical advice: redirect directly to the final URL in a single hop. One hop sidesteps the entire question about how many the crawler will follow, and it’s faster for users too.

How to diagnose a redirect error

You want to see the redirect Google is choking on:

  • URL Inspection (GSC). Live URL Inspection follows the redirect and tests the final URL — but it doesn’t show you the path it took or name the final URL, so it can’t replace a hop-by-hop trace when you need to see where the chain breaks. (A related but different tool — Google’s crawling infrastructure calls it “Google Inspection Tools” — explicitly does not follow redirects at all; don’t assume every “inspection” surface behaves the same way.) Use it to confirm Google’s overall verdict, not to see the chain.
  • curl -IL (or a redirect-checker tool) to trace every hop and status code from the command line — the fastest way to spot a chain or loop. Commands are in the Scripts tab.
  • Lighthouse. Google’s own doc suggests using a web debugging tool such as Lighthouse to get more detail about the redirect.
  • A crawler — Ahrefs Site Audit, Screaming Frog, or Sitebulb — to surface redirect chains and loops at scale across the whole site, which is how you catch the ones you didn’t know about.
  • The browser. A loop shows up immediately as ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.
TIP

Trace the affected URL hop by hop with the Redirect Checker Free

  1. Run the exact old URL reported in Search Console rather than only testing the final destination.
  2. Identify the repeated URL that proves the redirect never reaches a final page.
  3. Remove the conflicting rule, rerun the source URL, and confirm it reaches the intended live destination before validating the fix in Search Console.
This is an actual redirect failure: the chain revisits its starting URL and ends without a final destination.

The completed result is labeled Broken — fix now. It shows example.com/a returning 301, example.com/b returning 302, and example.com/a returning 301 again. The result reports a redirect loop and no final URL.

How to fix it, step by step

  1. Reproduce the redirect (curl / redirect-checker / browser) and identify the broken hop — the loop, the over-length target, the bad URL, or the chain.
  2. Replace the chain or loop with a single direct hop to the final URL — and pick the fix based on what that URL is actually supposed to do, not on autopilot. Permanent move → a single 301 (or 308). Genuinely temporary move → 302/303/307 instead, since Google treats permanent and temporary redirects differently for canonical signals. If the old URL shouldn’t redirect at all anymore, restore it to a real 200; if the content is gone for good with no replacement, a 404/410 can be the right answer instead of forcing a redirect. Whatever you land on, no intermediaries.
  3. Update internal links so they point at that final URL — don’t keep linking to the old, redirecting address.
  4. Re-test with curl/URL Inspection to confirm a clean single redirect (or a direct 200).
  5. Validate Fix in Search Console. Note that this queues a re-check — it doesn’t re-index instantly. Resolution still depends on Google recrawling the URL on its own schedule, so don’t expect an immediate status change.

Where these cluster: site migrations

In my experience the bulk of redirect errors are born during migrations — HTTP→HTTPS moves, www/non-www consolidation, domain changes, CMSA content management system (CMS) is software that lets users create, manage, and publish digital content — like blog posts and pages — without writing raw code. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are the most common open-source CMS platforms. replatforms, and trailing-slash changes. That’s where chains and loops accumulate, because you end up with layers of redirect rules stacked on top of each other. The discipline that prevents it: maintain a redirect map and point each old URL directly at its final new URL — not at an intermediate URL that itself redirects. If you redirect old → interim → new, you’ve built a chain on day one.

A note on 301 vs 302 (since it comes up)

A redirect error isn’t about which redirect type you used — it’s about the redirect being unfollowable. But while we’re here: 3xx redirects don’t lose PageRankPageRank is Google's original recursive link-graph algorithm: a page's score depends on the scores of the pages linking to it, and in the published model each page's score is split across its outbound links (the simplified version: links are weighted votes). Google says it's evolved since launch but still part of its core ranking systems., and Google can come to treat a 302 like a 301 over time (I’ve run that experiment myself — a long-lived 302 between two established sites behaved like a permanent move). Still, for a permanent move, use a 301 to send the clearest canonical signal. Use the right type, and make it a single hop.

The sibling status “Page with redirect” (covered above) is the normal, non-error counterpart — keep them straight. A redirect chain is the most common underlying cause here, and the Page Indexing reportThe Google Search Console report (formerly Index Coverage) showing how many of your URLs are indexed vs. not indexed, and grouping the not-indexed ones by reason. is the GSC report all of these statuses live in. For the bigger picture of how Google decides what to index, see the indexing hub.

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