Why it matters
Google trusts redirects very much when it clusters duplicates, and whether a redirect is permanent or temporary decides which URL becomes canonical: with a temporary redirect Google keeps showing the source URL. Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops, and long chains hurt crawling. Google follows JavaScript redirects only after rendering and may never see one if rendering fails; said at Search Central Live, even Google's own site consolidation used JavaScript only because it was the only option available to the person doing it, a fallback rather than a pattern to copy.
How to meet it
Answer every moved, merged or renamed URL with one 301 or 308 to the final URL, and collapse old chains in the redirect map into single hops. Update internal links, canonicals, hreflang and sitemaps to the new URL. Use 302 or 307 only for genuinely temporary moves, and avoid meta refresh and JavaScript redirects for permanent ones.
How to test it
curl -sIL on an old URL shows one 301 or 308 hop ending in 200; a crawler's redirect-chain report is empty; after recrawl, URL Inspection of the new URL shows it as the Google-selected canonical.
How Regensbot covers it
Decided from one URL.
An audit reads the response, the headers, the HTML, robots.txt, the sitemaps and the structured data, and the finding shows the evidence it saw.
Sources
Google documents03
- 01Redirects and Google SearchGoogle Search Central (opens in a new tab)
- 02How HTTP status codes affect Google's crawlersGoogle (opens in a new tab)
- 03Optimize your crawl budgetGoogle (opens in a new tab)
Claims in the knowledge base10
- D2-C013SourceWelcome to indexing day!Google's documentation
- D2-C361ConsistentHandling web duplicationSaid on stage
- D2-C362ConsistentHandling web duplicationSaid on stage
- D2-C363n/aHandling web duplicationThe author's interpretation
- D2-C357SourceHandling web duplicationGoogle's documentation
- D2-C387ConsistentHandling web duplicationShown on screen
- D1-C349ConfirmedHow crawling errors affect SearchSaid on stage
- D1-C370SourceHow crawling errors affect SearchGoogle's documentation
- D1-C541UndocumentedQ&ASaid on stage
- D1-C542n/aQ&AThe author's interpretation
Claim IDs refer to the Search Central Live 2026 knowledge base. The knowledge base (opens in a new tab)
- Confirmed
- Google's documentation states the same thing.
- Consistent
- Google's documentation supports it without stating it.
- Undocumented
- Said or shown at the event, not in the documentation.
- Source
- The claim is the cited document itself.
- n/a
- Nothing to verify: a quotation, framing, opinion or analysis.