Page with redirect: what it means and when to fix it

Most sites have many of these.

An important page you expect to rank is redirecting, often because of a misconfigured rule, a CMS slug change, or a localisation redirect based on location. The sitemap lists redirecting URLs instead of their destinations. Internal links throughout the site point to old URLs. Redirects chain through several hops, or point to an irrelevant page such as the homepage.

Export the example URLs. Inspect a sample in URL Inspection to confirm where they redirect. Use a redirect checker or browser extension to view the full chain and status codes. Compare the list with your sitemap: any overlap is a sitemap to fix. Crawl the site with a tool like Screaming Frog to find internal links to redirecting URLs.

Update the sitemap to list only final destination URLs. Update internal links to point straight at destinations, which saves a hop for users and crawlers. Collapse chains so each old URL redirects in one step. Use permanent redirects, 301 or 308, for permanent moves. Remove redirects only if the old URLs have no links or traffic and you are sure they will not be requested.

Not necessarily. The number of redirecting URLs Google knows about can stay stable for a long time, because Google keeps old URLs in its records and occasionally rechecks them. A steady or slowly declining count is normal. A sudden jump right after a deploy is worth investigating, since it may mean a new rule is redirecting pages that should not move. Our broken link checker reports the status code of every link on a page, including redirects. SerionFlow is the wrong tool for cleaning up redirects in your existing links and sitemaps; those live in your CMS and host.