Short answer: paste up to 50 URLs. For each one you get the final status code, every redirect hop with its code, the final URL and the response time, plus a flag for each problem found. Download the lot as CSV.
What the codes mean to Google
These come from Google’s page on how HTTP status codes affect its crawlers:
- 3xx. Crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops. A 301 or 308 is a strong signal that the target should be processed, a 302, 303 or 307 a weak one.
- 4xx. Google doesn’t index URLs that return a 4xx status and removes already indexed ones over time. 429 is the exception: it counts as a server error.
- 5xx. Google slows its crawling. Indexed pages are kept for a while and eventually dropped if the error stays.
What gets flagged
- 4xx and 5xx final statuses, loops, and more than 10 redirects.
- A redirect chain of two or more hops.
- A 302, 303 or 307 that only changes the scheme, the www prefix, a trailing slash or letter case. Those changes are permanent by nature, so they should be a 301 or 308.
- An http URL that redirects to https (noted), one that stays on http, and any redirect from https back to http.
- A redirect to another host, and slow answers.
Reading the numbers
Response time is the time to the response headers, added up over every hop, measured from our server. It isn’t what a visitor on another continent sees, but a server that’s slow for us is worth a look. Each URL has 10 seconds to answer, and a long list is checked in pieces so results appear as they arrive.
What it doesn’t see
Only HTTP redirects are followed, not meta refresh or JavaScript redirects. A page that returns 200 with an error message (a soft 404) looks fine here. For one URL in depth, use the redirect checker; to find broken links on a page, use the broken link checker.