Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site?

Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site? How about how many redirects I can chain together?
Matt Cutts, Bay Area, California

Other things to watch out for with chained redirects:
- Avoid infinite loops.
- Browsers may also have redirect limits, and these limits can vary by browser, so multiple redirects may affect regular users in addition to Googlebot.
- Minimizing redirects can improve page speed: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rtt.html#AvoidRedirects

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Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• grabbag
• google
• seo
• 301
• redirect

[familybizguy]

Thanks Matt!

I want to commend your approach to going back and taking more of an overview in addressing some of the topics lately. It's Extremely Helpful for us webmasters who are developing more experience.

[JingaWorks]

Thanks Matt for this, but just saying that I want to change the design completely and I intend to putt the old content on the home page of the new design. I want to redirect 301 (6 actual pages) to the home page of the new design. It is that allowed or I will be penalized for this. The new design it will look like sensation com. The content I intend to redirect is not much, but all 6 pages are listed in Webmaster Tools as Sitelinks for my domain and all pages have PR 1. What to do in this case?

[TheKingOfTechnology]

if we do 301 to google do we get higher PR

[familybizguy]

@dcnopp1 - You're very welcome! :-)

[MyDogWorldVideos]

Hi, I watched a video on multiple 301 redirects and the answer was it was ok if consolidating brands/domains to one site, what about a change in structure to a site to offer price comparison, so 1000 x 301 redirects from old page to new page within same site and domain, is this ok?

[dcnopp1]

@familybizguy Thanx for your response.

[erfanullahjan]

I wanted to "clean" my URLs and I had to use chain redirects with 4-5 hops. My traffic decreased by ~80% . It took more than a month to restore. But my URLs look pretty now : like this one: "example.com/financial/ratios/­current-ratio"

[SNW175]

Sorry.

Slander, is inappropriate. PR4 is right.

Random, it was basic.

#1 with a PR 0.

Okay so lets say I diagram your algorithm at 16.

[CoolModifiedCars]

here is proof

google.com/support/forum/p/Web­masters/thread?tid=67fbbe2b3a6­b79c7&hl=en

[CoolModifiedCars]

All right Matt!!! I asked this question 2 days before you posted the Video....Where's my Credit eh??? Its ok...but this does answer my question as no one else in the Universe could.

[joetek]

Thanks Matt!

I would guess that URL shorteners would also count as hops. You'd often see on Twitter, a t.co link (shortened automatically by twitter) pointing to say, bit.ly (automatically shortened by site links or twitter clients) before jumping to the final URL. Sometimes that final url is bounced again through an analytics tool to measure clicks (like hootsuite), and you're already at 4 with very little effort.

Does Google recognize that shorteners like t.co or bit.ly are different?