Response Codes: Internal Redirect Loop

Internal URLs that redirect to another URL, which also then redirects. This can occur multiple times in a row, each redirect is referred to as a ‘hop’.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

Use the ‘Response Codes’ tab and ‘Internal’ and ‘Redirect Loop’ filters to view these URLs.

This filter will only populate if a URL redirects to a previous URL within the redirect chain.

Redirect chains with a loop can be viewed and exported via ‘Reports > Redirects > Redirect Chains’ with the ‘Loop’ column filtered to ‘True’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when an internal URL returns a 3xx response code, that also returns a 3xx response code. Each instance of a redirect in a chain is referred to as a ‘hop’, and if a redirect loop occurs if a ‘hop’ then redirects back to the original. For example:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Redirects to:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/1

Which redirects back to the original URL:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

How To Fix

Ideally all internal links would be to canonical resolving URLs, and avoid linking to URLs that redirect.

Any URL that redirects should reference the final destination, rather than taking multiple ‘hops’ to get there to reduce latency for users, and enhanced efficiency for search engines.

This final URL should ideally resolve to a 200 ‘OK’ status.