Redirect and HTTP status checker

A 301 (and a 308) says the change is permanent, and Google passes the signals to the new URL and ends up indexing that one. A 302 (and a 307) says it is temporary, and Google may keep showing the old one. If the change is final, use a 301 or 308.

Every hop is one more request for the user and for Googlebot, which stops following a chain after 10 hops. Internal links that go through redirects also waste crawl budget. The right fix is to link and redirect straight to the final URL.

Some sites respond differently depending on the user-agent: they redirect bots to another version, or block them. The requests leave from Cloudflare, not from Google's IPs, so if a site verifies Googlebot by IP, it may block here and let the real bot through. To see how a URL responds to AI bots, use the bot access checker.

On the final URL it looks for noindex (in the X-Robots-Tag header or the meta robots tag), whether its canonical points to another URL, and whether it redirects with a meta refresh. It also warns you if any redirect goes from https to http.