Why it matters on an HVAC site
The trades are consolidating, and every acquisition brings a website. A company that has bought three smaller contractors has four domains, and the usual approach is to point each old domain at the new one, then later restructure the new one, then later still move to https.
Three restructures later, an old service page redirects to an old category, which redirects to a new category, which redirects to the https version of itself. Four hops for a page that used to rank.
How to check it yourself
- Crawl with redirects followed and report the hop count per URL. Anything over one hop is worth fixing; anything over three is urgent.
- `curl -IL` on any URL prints every hop in order, which is the quickest single check.
- Check the old domains too, since chains that start on a retired domain never show up in a crawl of the live one.
Worked through in numbers
A contractor acquired two companies in 2023 and 2024. Their top-performing old page still receives links from a supplier and a local paper.
`curl -IL` shows four hops: old domain http, old domain https, new domain old path, new domain current path. The final page responds in 2.3 seconds because each hop costs a round trip.
Rewriting the first rule to point straight at the final URL took it to one hop and 0.4 seconds. The links kept working throughout; what changed is that they now arrive somewhere directly.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Technical SEO. A redirect that points at another redirect.