Redirects and URL Normalization: One Address per Page

Every site has 4 default front doors: http and https, with and without www. A visitor or a crawler can arrive at any of them. Normalization collapses those into the canonical address reached in a direct 301 hop, so link equity, analytics and cookies all land in the same place. Redirect problems compound rather than announce themselves. A chain forms when an old rule and a new rule both fire, turning a request into 3 hops. Each hop costs latency and dilutes the signal, and crawlers abandon long chains. A loop forms when 2 rules disagree about the canonical form, appending a trailing slash on the way in and stripping it on the way out, and the page becomes unreachable for everyone, including the crawler that would have reported it. Redirects also carry a security dimension. An http URL that stays on http leaves a plaintext hop where a response can be modified in transit, and it splits the site into 2 addresses in the eyes of search engines. When you test a redirect, follow every hop from the outside, the way a crawler does, and look at the full path rather than only the destination. Fix the rules at the edge, in a central place, so a new redirect replaces the old ones instead of stacking on top of them.

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