URL Redirect Chain Remover

Description

One redirect may lead to another. For example, the URL http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/URL_redirection (note the domain name) is first redirected to redirection http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL redirection and then to the correct URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection. This is unavoidable if the different links in the chain are served by different servers though it should be minimized by rewriting the URL as much as possible on the server before returning it to the browser as a redirect.

Why does it matter

As a webmaster it is only natural to want your website to be on the first page of Google. You also want it to be indexed thoroughly so that you’re listing on the Google index and on the index of both Yahoo! and BING will benefit as much as possible from thematic linking and keyword density. This is the point at which a 301 redirect can throw up unexpected issues.

As a matter of fact BING announced relatively recently that redirect chains often present crawling difficulties which lead to either poor or non-existent indexing and Yahoo! often has the problem. Google is a little better but even the Google bot has crawling issues when it comes to following every link in a redirect chain. All of this leads to the very obvious solution of using redirects sparingly and only when they are absolutely necessary and then only by rewriting the .htaccess file (for Apache servers).