Why should my links point at the final address?
Because every link that lands on a redirect costs an extra request before the page arrives. One is nothing. A site whose own links routinely go through a forwarding address makes every crawler take the long way round, and some will stop counting how far they have walked.
What it actually is
A redirect is a server answer that says "this has moved, look over there". It is the right tool when a page moves. But the links on your own site still pointing at the old address, or at a version with a missing slash or the wrong prefix, now send every visitor and machine to the old address first, to be told to go somewhere else.
Why it matters
Crawlers have a budget for each site, in requests and in time, and every detour is spent from it. The HTTP standard lets a client follow a redirect but does not require it to, and a machine that sees a chain of them may give up before the end. Direct links also make your site's own map unambiguous: the address you link to is the address of the page.
What good looks like
Links between your own pages point at the exact address each page lives at, in its final form. Redirects still exist for old addresses that people and other sites might use, but your own navigation never relies on them.
Being honest about it
This is a warning at most, and a small one: a stray redirect from a missing slash is not worth anyone's afternoon, so we look for a pattern rather than a single case. We only look at links within your own site, because a link to another site that redirects is that site's business. And like the broken-links check, if too few of our requests complete to tell, we leave the result off.
Where most sites go wrong
The classic cause is a move done properly at the server and left undone in the content: the site moved to a new address or a new structure, the redirects were set up, and every menu and article still links to the old addresses. The other is a mismatch of small details, such as links without a trailing slash on a site that always adds one.
Not sure where yours stands?
A free scan checks this and everything else in about 20 seconds — no signup. Or if it's already flagged and you'd rather it were simply handled, we do that too.
Flagged for this one? We handle it. No pitch, just a plain-English chat.
Book a call