Does a 301 lose PageRank?

No. It did in 2013, at about 15%, and that number has been repeated ever since. Google stated in 2016 that redirects no longer lose PageRank, and the current site-move documentation says the same.

How many hops will Googlebot follow?

Around five in a single crawl, after which it stops and queues the URL for another attempt. It is not a hard cliff so much as a delay that compounds.

Should I redirect a retired page to the homepage?

Only if the homepage is genuinely the closest equivalent, which it rarely is. Google treats an irrelevant redirect as a soft 404. A 410 is more honest and faster to process.

3 min read

Do redirect chains hurt SEO, and how many hops are too many?

By CrawlWarden, which builds the monitoring described at the foot of this article.

Published 2026-09-28, sources last re-read 2026-10-04.

A redirect chain is a URL that redirects to a URL that redirects again. One 301 hop costs you essentially nothing: the claim that a 301 loses 15% of its PageRank was true in 2013 and has been false since 2016, confirmed by Gary Illyes and still reflected in Google’s site-move documentation. What chains actually cost is crawl efficiency and user latency, and Googlebot follows a limited number of hops per crawl - commonly cited as around five - before it gives up and comes back later.

What a chain actually costs

Latency. Every hop is a full round trip. Four hops on a mobile connection is a visible delay before anything renders.
Crawl budget. Each hop is a separate fetch. A site with thousands of chained URLs spends its crawl allowance discovering redirects instead of reading pages.
Fragility. A chain breaks when any link in it changes. The longer the chain, the more ways it ends in a 404.
Not PageRank. This is the part most audits still get wrong.

Client-side redirects are the real bug

A JavaScript redirect or a <meta http-equiv="refresh"> returns HTTP 200 with a body, and only then moves the user. Google can process these, eventually, but it treats them as a weaker signal than a server response - and the crawlers that matter for AI citation mostly do not execute JavaScript at all. To them, the page is whatever the 200 contained.

Redirect at the server. The rule fires before the application boots, survives the application being down, and is the first thing any client sees.

Redirect status codes, briefly

Code	Meaning	When
301	Moved permanently	The default for a move you are not undoing. Passes signals fully.
302	Found (temporary)	A genuinely temporary diversion. Left in place for months, Google will treat it as a 301 anyway.
308 / 307	Permanent / temporary, method preserved	Same semantics, but the request method survives. Relevant for non-GET traffic.
410	Gone	Not a redirect. The clean way to remove a page in bulk - definitive on first contact, unlike noindex.

Flatten, do not delete

The fix for A → B → C → D is to change A to point directly at D, and to leave B and C pointing at D as well. Deleting the intermediate rules breaks every external link that still points at them.

The checks that report this

CrawlWarden watches a list of URLs you choose and reports what changed. It does not diagnose and it does not score. Severity is a property of the check rather than a setting: the number below is how many consecutive runs must see the new value before it becomes an email, and it is never less than two, because one observation is noise.

Redirect chainconfirmed over 3 consecutive runs
Reports when a watched page starts redirecting, changes destination, or gains hops.
HTTP statusconfirmed over 2 consecutive runs
Reports when the status a page returns stops being the status it used to return.

Every check is available on every plan, including the free one. CrawlWarden pricing, per site rather than per URL.

Questions

Does a 301 lose PageRank?: No. It did in 2013, at about 15%, and that number has been repeated ever since. Google stated in 2016 that redirects no longer lose PageRank, and the current site-move documentation says the same.
How many hops will Googlebot follow?: Around five in a single crawl, after which it stops and queues the URL for another attempt. It is not a hard cliff so much as a delay that compounds.
Should I redirect a retired page to the homepage?: Only if the homepage is genuinely the closest equivalent, which it rarely is. Google treats an irrelevant redirect as a soft 404. A 410 is more honest and faster to process.

Sources

What was checked, and where. An entry with no link is something that could not be verified, named here rather than left out.

Google Search Central: Site moves with URL changes
The claim in the answer block, in Google’s own words: "‘301’ and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank."
Google Search Central: Redirects and Google Search
That a permanent redirect makes the target canonical while a temporary one keeps the source in results, and that an instant meta refresh reads as permanent while a delayed one reads as temporary.
Google: How Google interprets the robots.txt specification
The only hop count Google actually publishes: "at least five redirect hops" when fetching robots.txt. It is documented for that file, not for ordinary page crawling.
Not verified: a hop limit for ordinary page crawling
The "around five" figure is widely repeated and Google does not document it outside the robots.txt case above. Treated here as a rule of thumb, not a threshold.
Not verified: the 2016 attribution to Gary Illyes
The no-PageRank-loss position is in Google’s site-move documentation, cited above. The date and the attribution to a specific person come from conference and social posts, not a primary Google source.

Know the moment this happens to you

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