Free redirect checker
The free redirect checker that traces the whole redirect chain. Paste any URL and it follows every 301, 302, 307 and 308, then shows per-hop timing and the exact SEO impact on the backlinks pointing through it. If the final page carries a meta refresh or a JavaScript redirect, it tells you the trail doesn't end there.
No signup. No credit card. 10 free checks per hour per IP.
Summary
Redirect chain
What this tool checks
- Redirect chain integrity — every 301, 302, 303, 307 and 308 hop, followed to the end.
- HTTP status code per hop — including network errors and the final destination response.
- Response timing — TTFB and total time per hop so you can spot slow servers in the chain.
- SEO impact on backlinks — is the chain permanent all the way through, or does a temporary hop leave the source URL as the one Google shows?
- Loop detection — catches infinite redirect cycles that crawlers silently abandon.
- Meta refresh & JS redirects — a best-effort scan of the final page, invisible to most simple checkers. It flags what it finds without executing anything, so treat a hit as "open this in a browser", not as proof.
How to use
- Paste your URL. Any URL — old page that should redirect, a backlink target, a tracking link.
- Click "Trace redirects". We follow every hop server-side, with a 30-second total budget and 10-hop max.
- Read the SEO impact verdict. The status panel tells you immediately whether backlinks survive this chain.
Why redirect chains matter for backlinks
Most "redirect checker" tools tell you the final URL and stop there. But if you're managing paid backlinks or running an outreach program, what you actually need to know is whether your backlinks still pass value through the chain you're seeing. Miss it, and you can report a link as live for weeks while it quietly points through a 302 to a page that no longer counts. When a link you paid for starts redirecting like that, it stops being the placement you bought — it becomes a recovery case.
Google's 2016 update made 301 (permanent) redirects effectively lossless for link equity. But long chains, 302s, meta refresh tags, and JavaScript redirects all still create problems — and most tools won't tell you which.
The five most common ways redirect chains break backlinks
- A clean 301 silently flips to a 302 after a CMS or middleware update. Google stops treating the destination as the canonical URL and keeps showing the old one.
- The chain keeps growing. Google follows up to 10 hops, so length alone rarely breaks anything — but every hop added is one more server that can stop answering.
- One hop changes the canonical tag to point at an unrelated URL, hijacking the link equity you've paid for.
- The final page returns 200 but ships a JavaScript redirect. Most crawlers stop here — they see the HTML body but never the destination.
- A redirect loop is introduced. Pages depend on cookies or session state, creating chains that work in a browser but loop infinitely for crawlers.
We built this tool because no free utility we could find answered the actual SEO question: does my backlink still work? It's the same question our paid product answers automatically for every link in your portfolio, every day.
Frequently asked questions
How many redirects is too many?
Google's own crawling documentation says its crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops by default, so ordinary chains sit nowhere near the ceiling. Treat hop count as a maintenance signal rather than a penalty: every extra hop is one more place the path can break, and a link arriving through five hops usually means nobody has touched that site's URL structure in a long time. Collapsing intermediate hops into a single 301 is still the tidier setup.
Does a 301 redirect pass link juice?
Yes. Google has said since 2016 that no PageRank is lost through 301 or other 30x redirects, so the older belief that every hop skims a percentage off is wrong. Google's current documentation frames it in canonicalization terms rather than equity: with a permanent redirect the indexing pipeline treats the target as the canonical URL.
Is 302 bad for SEO?
Not in the equity sense people expect. Google's redirect documentation says the indexing pipeline doesn't use a temporary redirect as a signal that the target should be canonical, so the source page is the one shown in search results. Using 301 from day one is best practice when the change is permanent, and a 302 that has been sitting there for months is usually a forgotten config rather than a deliberate choice.
What's a redirect loop?
A chain where URL A redirects to URL B, which eventually redirects back to URL A (sometimes via several hops). Browsers usually stop after a few iterations, but crawlers treat looped chains as broken — backlinks pointing into them have no useful destination.
What's the difference between 301 and 308?
Both are permanent redirects. 301 may be converted from POST to GET by some clients; 308 enforces the original method strictly. For SEO purposes Google treats them identically.
Can Google follow JavaScript redirects?
Googlebot can sometimes follow JS redirects after rendering, but most other crawlers and link-monitoring tools cannot. Server-side 301 is always safer for SEO.
Why do my backlinks keep getting marked as lost in other tools?
Most monitoring tools use simple HTTP fetchers and miss JavaScript-rendered content. LinkGuard's paid product uses real-browser fallback (Browserbase) to eliminate these false positives.
Does this work as a 301 redirect checker?
Yes. Paste any URL and it shows the status of each hop — 301, 302, 307, or 308 — so it works as a 301 redirect checker and flags the case that matters most for SEO: a permanent 301 that has quietly become a temporary 302.
Is this a redirect tracker, tester, or detector?
Those are all names for the same job: following a URL's redirects and showing you the path. Whatever you call it — redirect tracker, redirect tester, redirect detector, link redirect checker, or 301 checker — this traces the full chain hop by hop, tells you where it ends, and flags any temporary hop along the way.
How is a redirect chain checker different from a redirect checker?
They're the same tool here. A basic redirect checker often reports only the final URL; a redirect chain checker follows every hop in between — which is where the SEO problems hide (a 302 mid-chain, a loop). This shows the full chain, flags any temporary hop that stops Google treating the destination as canonical, and catches a meta refresh or JavaScript redirect sitting on the final page.
How can I monitor redirect chains on hundreds of backlinks at once?
That's exactly what our paid product does — checks every link in your portfolio every day, flags chain changes the moment a clean 301 turns into something dodgy. Start free with 1000 tokens.
Last updated: 2026-05-31