How do redirect chains leak link equity?

A single, sensible redirect is fine — search engines follow it and pass along almost all of the original page's authority. The problem is chains: link → redirect → redirect → destination.

Each extra hop adds latency for visitors and risk for crawlers. Google has said it follows a limited number of hops before giving up, and every hop is one more opportunity for something to break silently later — an expired domain in the middle, an http→https bounce, a trailing-slash ping-pong.

Chains usually appear gradually: you moved a page in 2023, restructured in 2024, switched to HTTPS somewhere in between. Nobody links through three moves on purpose.

LinkGuard flags any link that passes through two or more redirects, and shows you the final destination — update the link to point there directly.