Redirect checker: bulk 301s, chains and old URLs
Where do your old URLs go now?
Paste up to 100 URLs, or enter your domain and pull your old URLs from the Wayback Machine. The checker follows every redirect the way a crawler does and sorts the results worst first: broken pages, redirects to the homepage, chains and temporary redirects, each with what it means for Google and what to do.
Check your URLs
What each result means
| Result | What it means |
|---|---|
| Broken: 404 not found | The page is gone and Google drops it. Redirect it if the content moved. |
| Gone: 410 | Removed on purpose. Google treats it like a 404. |
| Blocked or broken (4xx) | A login wall, a bot block or a broken page. Google drops it like a 404. |
| Challenged by a firewall | The site’s firewall challenged our checker, so this may not be what Google gets. |
| Server error (5xx) | The server failed. Google slows its crawling and may drop the URL. |
| No response | Nothing answered: DNS, the connection or a timeout failed. |
| Redirects to the homepage | An inner page lands on the homepage. Google may treat it as a soft 404. |
| Redirect loop | The redirects go in a circle and never reach a page. |
| Too many redirects | More than 10 hops, the limit Google’s crawlers follow by default. |
| Looks like an error page | Answers 200 but reads like an error page. Google may call it a soft 404. |
| Lands on the wrong page | Lands somewhere other than the page in your redirect map. |
| Redirect chain | Two or more hops. Google asks for one, and ideally no more than 3. |
| Temporary redirect (302, 303 or 307) | A 302, 303 or 307. Google generally keeps showing the old URL. |
| Meta refresh, not a server redirect | An HTML meta refresh instead of a server redirect. |
| Ends on another host | Ends on a different hostname. Expected after a domain move. |
| Not an HTML page | A file, not a page. Only an X-Robots-Tag header can noindex it. |
| Permanent redirect (301 or 308) | A 301 or 308 to a working page. Google shows the target. |
| Works, no redirect | Answers 200 with no redirect. Nothing to fix. |
When the final page loads, the checker also reads its robots meta tag, X-Robots-Tag header and canonical tag, so a leftover noindex shows up here too. The noindex and robots.txt checker explains those results and adds robots.txt.
How to use the redirect checker
Choose a starting point. Paste URLs one per line, or load a .txt, .csv or XML sitemap file. No list to hand? Choose Find my old URLs, enter your domain and a day in the month before your relaunch, and the checker lists the pages the Wayback Machine archived back then.
Compare against your redirect map. In Compare old and new, paste each old URL with the page it should land on. Any URL that ends somewhere else is flagged, even when its redirect technically works.
Pick who the checker says it is. Keep our checker unless you need to see what Google or a visitor gets. Googlebot smartphone sends Google’s user agent, but sites that verify Googlebot by its IP address will see it isn’t Google. Chrome on a desktop shows what a visitor gets.
Read the summary, then the table. The worst rows come first. Open any row for every hop: the status code, the Location header it sent, how long it took, and the response headers.
Share the results. Filter by result, download the CSV for your developer, or copy a link that opens the checker with the same URLs filled in. The link carries up to 20 URLs in the address itself, so nothing is stored on our side.
How to find your old URLs
The Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive keeps copies of public pages. Find my old URLs asks its index for pages captured on or before your date, leaves out files and query strings, and puts shallow pages first. It only knows pages someone saved, and it’s slow: on October 23, 2026, answers took 10–50 seconds and the archive turned requests away when busy.
Your old XML sitemap. If the old site had one at /sitemap.xml, it listed every page you wanted indexed. Look in a backup or the old CMS, or search the Wayback Machine for yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, then load the file here.
Search Console. In the Performance report, set the dates to the months before the relaunch, open the Pages tab and export it. Those pages earned clicks, so redirect them first. After the relaunch, the Pages report lists the URLs Google found returning 404 under “Not found (404)”.
Your analytics. A landing-page report for organic search, set to the months before the relaunch, gives the same list ranked by visits.
Pages other sites link to. A backlink tool’s top-pages report lists old URLs that other sites point at. Those links still use the old address, so each old URL needs to land somewhere useful.
Redirect rules from Google’s own docs
Use a permanent redirect for a permanent move. Google takes a 301 or 308 as a signal that the target is the URL to show in results. A 302, 303 or 307 isn’t, so Google generally keeps showing the old URL. An instant meta refresh counts as permanent, a delayed one as temporary (Google’s redirects guide, last updated April 14, 2026).
Redirect straight to the final page. Google’s crawlers follow up to 10 hops (Google’s guide to HTTP status codes, last updated February 4, 2026). The site-move guide asks you to redirect to the final destination directly, or keep a chain to ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5 (Google’s site-move guide, last updated August 20, 2026).
Send each old URL to its own match. The same guide says not to redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant page such as the homepage, because Google might treat that as a soft 404: a page that counts as missing even though it loads.
Keep the redirects. For as long as possible, the guide says, and generally at least a year.
Prefer the server to JavaScript. Google says to use a JavaScript redirect only when a server-side or meta refresh redirect isn’t possible, because Google might never see it if rendering fails (Google’s redirects guide, last updated April 14, 2026).
Moving domains? Tell Search Console. After a domain move, file a Change of Address for the old domain. A move from http to https doesn’t need one (Google’s site-move guide, last updated August 20, 2026).
Old URLs broken after a relaunch?
Rescue maps every old URL to the right new page and writes a developer ticket for every indexing fix, and our crawl confirms the fix before you pay the second half. If the relaunch doesn’t explain the whole drop, start with the free Cause Check: it also lines your drop up against Google’s updates and checks for AI answers.
You’re about to relaunch.
Launch Cover checks your redirect map against every old URL and checks the new build before launch, then crawls the site on launch day.
Launch CoverYou want the whole checklist.
What breaks rankings in a redesign or migration, and the checks that catch it before launch: old URLs, redirects, noindex, canonicals and rendering.
Redesign without losing SEOTraffic already fell after the relaunch.
The redesign is the first suspect, but Google’s Search Status Dashboard lists eight confirmed ranking updates from December 2025 to October 2026, so one often lands in the same quarter as a relaunch.
Your redesign
Redirect questions
How do I check if a redirect is a 301 or a 302?
Paste the URL above and open its row. The hop table shows the status code of every hop: 301 and 308 are permanent, 302, 303 and 307 are temporary. In a browser, the Network tab of the developer tools shows the same, one URL at a time.
What is a redirect chain?
A URL that redirects to another URL that redirects again before reaching a page. Chains build up over relaunches, when new redirects land on addresses that were themselves redirected later. Google’s crawlers follow up to 10 hops, but its site-move guide asks for ideally no more than 3. Point the first URL straight at the final page.
Are 301 redirects bad for SEO?
No. A 301 is how you tell Google a page has moved for good, and Google takes it as a signal that the new URL is the one to show. The trouble comes from where redirects point: to the homepage, to the wrong page, or through a long chain.
How long does a 301 redirect take to work?
For visitors, immediately. For Google, once it recrawls the old URL and processes the redirect, which depends on how often Google visits that page. Nobody can promise a date for that. Keep the redirect in place for at least a year.
Should I redirect old pages to my homepage?
Only the old homepage. Google’s site-move guide warns that sending many old URLs to one irrelevant page, such as the homepage, might be treated as a soft 404, so the old page counts as missing. Redirect each old URL to its closest match and let pages with no match return 404 or 410.
What do 307 and 308 redirects mean?
Both keep the request method, so a form submission stays a submission. A 308 is permanent, like a 301, and Google treats it as one. A 307 is temporary, like a 302.
Why is my 301 redirect not working?
The usual causes: your browser cached an older redirect (test in a private window, or here), the rule matches the wrong pattern, a CDN or platform rule fires first, an https or trailing-slash rule adds a hop or a loop, or the redirects were set up on staging and never reached the live server. The hop table and the response headers show what answered at each step.
How do I fix too many redirects?
It’s a loop or a very long chain. Open the row and look for where the hops start repeating. Usually two rules undo each other: one adds a trailing slash and another removes it, or a CDN forces https while the server sends visitors back to http. Remove one of the pair.
What does “Page with redirect” mean in Search Console?
Google found a URL that redirects, so it indexes the target instead. That’s expected for old URLs you redirected on purpose. Paste the list here: if each one lands on its matching page, there’s nothing to fix.
Do you store the URLs I check?
No. Your list and the results stay in your browser. Our server requests each URL and sends back what it found, without saving your list or the results. Archive searches are cached for a day so a repeat search is quicker. A share link carries its URLs in the link itself.
More free tools
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Google update checker
Enter the date your traffic dropped, or load a Search Console export, and see which confirmed Google updates overlap. It runs in your browser.
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