URL & Redirect Status Checker
Check any URL's full redirect chain for free, no sign-in. See every hop's status code, the final destination, and how long the whole chain took to resolve.
Check URL status & redirects
No sign-in needed for up to 200 URLs at a time. Sign in with Google for up to 500. Each URL gets checked for its full redirect chain, not just the final status.
How the status checker works
- Request the URL — we send a request without letting it auto-follow any redirect, so we see the raw response at every step.
- Read the status — a 3xx status with a destination header means another hop; anything else is the end of the chain.
- Follow the chain — we repeat this for each hop, in order, until we reach a final response or hit a safety cap.
- Report everything — the final status, final URL, total hop count, and time taken, with the full chain available to expand.
Why status codes and redirects matter for SEO
Crawl budget
Every redirect a crawler has to follow is an extra request. On a large site, long or unnecessary redirect chains eat into the crawl budget search engines allocate you, leaving less of it for your actual content.
Link equity
A clean 301 passes nearly all of a page's ranking signal to its new URL. Each additional hop in a chain is another opportunity for that signal to degrade.
Broken links hurt twice
A 404 doesn't just frustrate a visitor — it's a dead end for search engines too, and dead ends discourage a crawler from coming back as often.
301 vs 302 semantics
Using a temporary (302) redirect for a permanent move confuses search engines about which URL should actually rank — they may keep indexing the old one.
Redirect best practices
- Use 301 for permanent moves — it's the clearest signal to transfer ranking to the new URL.
- Keep chains to one hop — redirect straight to the final destination instead of through several intermediate URLs.
- Update internal links — point them at the final URL directly rather than relying on a redirect to catch them.
- Fix or remove dead links — a 404 on a page you still link to internally is worth fixing every time it turns up.
HTTP status code reference guide
Every response a server sends back opens with a three-digit status code — the fastest way to tell whether a request succeeded, got redirected, or failed. Codes are grouped into five families by their first digit. Below is a working reference for the ones you'll actually run into on a live site, plus how a search crawler generally treats each one.
One historical note: early HTTP versions paired each code with a short text reason ("200 OK", "404 Not Found"). HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 dropped that text entirely — the number is now the only part of a response guaranteed to be there, which is exactly why this tool, like every other status checker, keys off the code alone rather than any accompanying message.
1xx — Informational.Codes starting with 1 (100 Continue, 101 Switching Protocols, and a few others) are provisional — the server saying "keep going" mid-handshake before it sends the real response. You won't see these here, since this tool only reports each hop's final response, not what happened before it.
2xx — Success
The request worked. This is what every real page and asset on your site should return.
| Code | What it means | How search crawlers treat it |
|---|---|---|
| 200 OK | The standard success response — the server found what was asked for and returned it in full. | The code every indexable page should return. Crawlers read and score the page normally from here. |
| 204 No Content | The request succeeded but there's nothing to send back — used for responses that only confirm an action happened. | A crawler landing on a 204 finds no content to index. If that URL was meant to hold a real page, this usually points to a bug rather than an intentional empty response. |
3xx — Redirection
The resource has moved, or the server wants the client to look elsewhere. This is exactly what the tool above walks hop by hop.
| Code | What it means | How search crawlers treat it |
|---|---|---|
| 301 Moved Permanently | The page has moved for good; the response names the new address. | A strong signal to drop the old URL from ranking consideration and hand its signals to the new one. |
| 302 Found | The page is available somewhere else for now, but the original address should still be used going forward. | Followed, but treated as a weaker signal — the original URL is more likely to stay the one that's indexed. |
| 304 Not Modified | Tells a client that already has a cached copy that nothing has changed, so it can keep using what it has. | Read as confirmation nothing needs reprocessing — it doesn't move the page's standing in the index either way. |
| 307 Temporary Redirect | Functionally the same temporary move as a 302, but guarantees the request method doesn't change on the next hop. | Handled the same as a 302 for ranking purposes. |
| 308 Permanent Redirect | The permanent counterpart to 307 — same method guarantee, applied to a permanent move. | Handled the same as a 301 for ranking purposes. |
4xx — Client errors
Something about the request is the problem — a missing page, a permissions issue, or too many requests too fast.
| Code | What it means | How search crawlers treat it |
|---|---|---|
| 400 Bad Request | The server couldn't make sense of the request as sent. | Rare on a normal page — usually a malformed URL or a server-side bug. |
| 401 Unauthorized | The resource needs credentials the request didn't include. | A crawler can't see what's behind a 401. Fine for genuinely private pages, but it isn't a valid lever for controlling how often a crawler visits. |
| 403 Forbidden | The server understood the request and is refusing it outright — logging in wouldn't change the outcome. | Same as 401 for index access, and the same caveat: not a legitimate way to throttle a crawler either. |
| 404 Not Found | Nothing exists at this address. | A new URL won't be indexed while it 404s; an already-indexed one gets dropped after this becomes consistent. |
| 408 Request Timeout | The server gave up waiting for the rest of the request to arrive. | Usually a connection or load issue rather than anything about the page itself. |
| 410 Gone | Like a 404, but explicit that the resource isn't coming back — a deliberate, permanent removal rather than an unexplained miss. | Acted on faster than a plain 404 — the signal is unambiguous, so removal from the index tends to happen sooner. |
| 429 Too Many Requests | The client has sent more requests than the server will accept in the current window. | A well-behaved crawler reads this as "slow down" and backs off its request rate — but a URL that keeps returning it can still fall out of the index over time. |
5xx — Server errors
The server itself failed to complete a request it otherwise understood — these point at infrastructure, not the URL.
| Code | What it means | How search crawlers treat it |
|---|---|---|
| 500 Internal Server Error | A generic failure — something broke on the server that it couldn't categorize more specifically. | Persistent 500s make a crawler pull back its request rate, and content it fetched before the errors started gets treated as unreliable. |
| 502 Bad Gateway | A server acting as a gateway or proxy got a broken response from the server it was talking to upstream. | Same crawl pullback as 500 if it persists. |
| 503 Service Unavailable | The server is temporarily unable to handle the request — often deliberate, during maintenance or under heavy load. | Treated as temporary at first, but repeated 503s over time lead to the same crawl pullback as any other 5xx run. |
| 504 Gateway Timeout | A gateway or proxy timed out waiting for a response from an upstream server it depends on. | Same crawl pullback as 500 if it persists. |
A special case: the soft 404
A soft 404 is a page that tells a visitor the content doesn't exist while still returning a 200 to the server. At the HTTP level it looks perfectly fine, but a person sees an error message — and search engines that spot this pattern exclude the page from results anyway, so it gets the downside of a 404 without ever showing up as one in a status check. If a page is genuinely gone, return a real 404 or 410 rather than a 200 with an error message printed on it.
URL & redirect checker: FAQ
A 301 tells search engines a page has moved permanently and to transfer its ranking signals to the new URL. A 302 signals a temporary move — search engines generally keep the original URL indexed rather than replacing it. Use 301 for anything permanent, like a URL restructure.
One hop is fine. Two is usually still okay. Beyond that, each extra redirect adds latency, can leak a little link equity, and eats into the crawl budget search engines allocate to your site — so a chain of 4-5 redirects for one URL is worth cleaning up.
No — this tool follows real HTTP-level redirects only (the status code and Location header a server sends back), the same way a search crawler evaluates them. Redirects triggered by client-side JavaScript after the page loads won't show up here.
If a redirect chain ever points at a local or private network address (which should never legitimately happen for a public page), we stop following it there rather than fetching it, and flag it as blocked.
Yes — paste up to 200 URLs, one per line, and every one gets checked, no sign-in needed. Sign in with Google to raise that to 500, or upgrade to Pro (₹499/month) for up to 5,000. Every row shows the full status chain (e.g. 308 → 308 → 200) right in the table, and you can download the whole batch as an Excel file once it's done.
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