Internal links that redirect: what it really costs

You moved a page to a new address and set up a permanent redirect from the old one. Good call. The problem is that the links scattered across your own site still point at the old address.

Every click there becomes two trips instead of one. The browser asks for the old page, the server answers "that one moved, go to this other one", and only then does the page start loading.

That is the subject of this article. It is common, easy to find and cheap to fix. And most of what gets said about it is wrong.

What it looks like in practice

Say your consulting page lived at /consulting and you moved it to /services/consulting. A permanent redirect was created, and anyone typing the old address lands on the new one without noticing. Perfect.

Except the site menu, the footer, three blog articles and the home page still carry the link written like this:

<a href="/consulting">Consulting</a>

Nothing is broken. Visitors do reach the destination. But they take the long road, and everyone who clicks pays that toll.

Why almost every site has this

The causes are always the same:

• Site migration. Addresses changed in bulk, the links inside the content did not.
• Slug changes. Someone improved an article's address and forgot who was pointing at it.
• The move from HTTP to HTTPS. Old links still written with http://.
• With and without www. The site answers on both, but one redirects to the other.
• Trailing slash. /page and /page/ look identical and are not always treated that way.
• A category or product that no longer exists and got a replacement destination.

What makes the number grow fast is repetition. One wrong link in the menu or the footer is not one problem, it is one problem multiplied by every page on the site.

In a measurement we ran on a large public portal, a single header link pointed at an address that redirected. It showed up on every page we analysed. Final count: eighteen links to fix, spread across nine pages, all for one wrong address.

What it does NOT cost, despite what almost everyone says

The most repeated claim about this is that you are "losing link juice". That claim is wrong.

In July 2016, Google's Gary Illyes stated publicly that 30x redirects no longer lose PageRank. John Mueller then confirmed this was not even news, it had been true for a while. It still holds today.

So no, the redirect is not eating your page's authority. Anyone saying otherwise is repeating advice from 2010 that Google itself retired.

Keep that in mind, because it also protects your budget: nobody needs to sell you an emergency project over this.

What it actually costs

Three things, and all three are real.

1. The time of the person who clicked. Each redirect is a round trip across the network before any content starts arriving. Google's own Lighthouse has an audit dedicated to it, called "Avoid multiple page redirects", precisely because the hop delays painting the screen. On a phone with a weak connection, that extra round trip is felt.

2. A crawler visit thrown away. To find out where the page really is, the search engine has to ask twice. On a small site that changes nothing. On a large site with tens of thousands of addresses, it starts to add up.

3. The signal that the migration never finished. This is the part almost nobody mentions. Internal links pointing at old addresses usually come with an outdated sitemap, canonical tags aiming at the wrong place and chains of two or three hops. The link is the visible symptom of a cleanup that stopped halfway.

What Google actually recommends

It is worth reading in its own words, because these are four concrete recommendations:

No drama: this is hygiene, not an emergency

On 3 February 2026, in an SEO forum, someone asked whether auditing redirect chains in the browser was a time sink. Google's John Mueller answered:

"I'd caution against assuming that you need to do this level of analysis for all URLs on a website in order to achieve optimal SEO."

He added that he does not recall a case like this causing SEO issues that were not also visible to average users in their browsers.

That is a healthy dose of realism. Fixing internal links that redirect is maintenance, like changing a water filter. You do it because it is cheap, it makes the site faster and it stops grime from building up. Not because the site will collapse tomorrow.

How to find them on your site

From the most manual to the most practical:

1. In the browser. Click a link and watch whether the address bar changes by itself after loading. Fine for confirming a suspicion, useless for sweeping a whole site.
2. With a crawler tool. It walks the site and shows the response of every address. It takes setup work and the result arrives as a spreadsheet.
3. In a SEOWrench audit. The report lists every internal link that lands on a redirect, grouped by the address that needs replacing, with the pages where it appears and the anchor text of each one. The grouping matters: that menu case becomes one line to fix, not eighteen.

One note on honesty: this finding does not lower your SEO score. Given everything above, it would make no sense to deduct points for something Google says is not a ranking factor. It shows up as a recommendation, with the list ready to work through.

How to fix them

The default is to swap the link for the final address. Where /consulting was written, put /services/consulting. Done, the visitor stops paying the toll.

Sometimes the better move is to remove the link and keep the plain text. That applies when the destination genuinely no longer exists and the replacement has nothing to do with the paragraph it sits in. A link that leads anywhere is worse than text with no link.

Start with whatever repeats. Menu, footer, sidebar and reusable blocks appear on every page, so one edit there clears dozens of occurrences. Only then move on to links inside the content.

The mistake that ruins it: deleting the redirect afterwards

This is the part that causes the most pain, and the easiest to avoid.

Fixing internal links does not entitle you to delete the redirect rule. The old address stays alive outside your control: links from other sites, real people's bookmarks, old shares in chat apps, emails sent last year, the search engine's own index.

Google asks you to keep the rule live for at least a year, and that recommendation exists because it is how long it takes to transfer every signal and reprocess third party links.

The rule of thumb is simple. Internal links you fix today. The redirect rule you keep.

When it is not a problem

Not every link to a redirecting address is a defect:

• Campaign links carrying parameters the site strips on purpose.
• Internal short links, the /promo kind, created precisely to be easy to say out loud.
• Intentional redirects on a page whose destination changes with the season.

In those cases the hop is the feature, not the fault. A good list has to let you mark those exceptions and stop flagging them.

Summary

• An internal link to a redirecting address does not cost you link juice. That is a myth.
• It costs a network round trip for whoever clicked, and one extra crawler visit.
• It almost always points to a migration that stopped halfway.
• Fix the links starting with the menu and the footer, where they multiply.
• Keep the redirect rule live after fixing them.

Sources

1. Google Search Central: site moves with URL changes
2. Google Search Central: crawl budget for large sites
3. Google Search Central: redirects and Google Search
4. Lighthouse: avoid multiple page redirects
5. Gary Illyes on 30x and PageRank, July 2016, via Search Engine Land
6. John Mueller on redirect analysis, 3 February 2026, on r/bigseo, reported by Search Engine Roundtable

If you want the ground around this, read what technical SEO is and site architecture for SEO, which covers how internal links spread relevance across a site.

And if you want your own list ready, with page and anchor text, a SEOWrench audit hands it over along with the rest of the diagnosis.