--- title: "The Backlink Audit That Found We Were Losing Equity to Our Own Redirects" url: "https://backlinkbuilding.io/insight/the-backlink-audit-that-found-we-were-losing-equity-to-our-own-redirects/" author: "RHILLANE Ayoub" published: "2026-09-25" updated: "2026-09-25" --- # The Backlink Audit That Found We Were Losing Equity to Our Own Redirects **TLDR:** A routine link audit on one of our own properties showed earned backlinks pointing at URLs we had quietly redirected months earlier, and every hop in the chain was bleeding a little authority before it reached the page we actually wanted ranked. The fix was not new link building, it was a redirect map we now check before any URL is ever changed. The lesson generalised to every client account we run: a site can be earning links and still losing the value of them. We had spent a year earning links the slow way, through guest posts, journalist Q&As and a handful of resource-page mentions, and the number looked healthy on paper. Then a colleague pulled a fresh crawl to check anchor text distribution and noticed something odd: a cluster of our best external links, from sites with real editorial standards, pointed at a URL structure we had abandoned eight months earlier. The pages still resolved. They just resolved through two, sometimes three redirect hops before landing on the current version. Nobody had done anything wrong on purpose. A URL slug got shortened for readability, a category page got merged into a broader one, and each change was reasonable in isolation. What nobody had done was go back and update the destination of every 301 to point straight at the final page instead of chaining through the old ones. ### **Why a Redirect Chain Costs More Than It Looks Like** A single 301 redirect is not free, but it is close enough to free that most teams stop worrying about it after the first hop. The real cost shows up at hop two and three, when a crawler and a user both have to follow a longer path to reach content, and the signals a search engine associates with the original linking page get diluted across each jump. [Google's own documentation on redirects](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects) is explicit that a long redirect chain is something to avoid, not something to tolerate as a side effect of normal site maintenance. What made ours worse was where the chains sat. They were not on obscure internal pages nobody cared about. They were on the exact URLs that outside publishers had chosen to cite, which meant our best inbound signals were the ones taking the scenic route. ### **What We Found When We Mapped It Properly** We exported every backlink we could confirm, matched each target URL against our current redirect table, and counted hops. Out of several dozen earned links, a meaningful share landed on a URL that had been redirected at least once, and a smaller but real number had been redirected twice. - Links landing on a live, current URL with zero redirects: the majority, and the ones clearly carrying their full weight. - Links redirected once, straight to the current page: still functioning, but slower to crawl and, on the pages where a search engine's own diagnostic tools flagged it, treated as slightly weaker than a direct link. - Links redirected twice or more: the smallest group, and the one we fixed first, because a chain of that length is the clearest signal that the link is not landing where it should. [Ahrefs' guide on internal links](https://ahrefs.com/blog/internal-links-for-seo/) makes the same point about a site's own internal linking, and the logic holds just as well for links coming in from outside: every hop between the linking page and the destination is a hop where some of the value can leak, and a crawler that gives up partway through a long chain never credits the destination at all. ### **The Fix We Built** The technical fix was mechanical once we saw the problem: update every 301 in the chain to point directly at the final live URL, so a link lands in one hop no matter how many times the destination has changed since the link was first placed. The process fix is the one that mattered more. **Any time a URL changes now, the same afternoon, we run our earned-backlink list against the new redirect and flatten any chain it would create.** It takes minutes. Before, a URL change was treated as a content and development task with no connection to the links pointing at it, and the two teams doing that work rarely looked at the same spreadsheet. We also stopped treating a redirect as a permanent fix in its own right. A redirect is a bridge, not a destination, and the correct long-term move is still to update the earned link at the source when the relationship with the publisher allows it, which recovers the full value rather than the discounted version a redirect preserves. ### **What This Means for a Site That Is Actively Earning Links** If your team is running outreach, guest posts, or journalist Q&As, the audit worth running is not only "how many links do we have," it is "how many hops does each one take to reach where it should." A site with a strong earning rate and a messy redirect history can be leaving real authority on the table without a single new link needed to fix it, and the check costs an afternoon against a crawl export you likely already have. It is the kind of gap a digital marketing agency running your outreach should be checking as a matter of course, not something the client has to discover by accident during an unrelated review, and it is now a standard line item in [our own audits](https://rhillane.com/en/) before any new link campaign starts. --- RHILLANE Ayoub is the founder and CEO of [Rhillane Marketing Digital](https://rhillane.com/en/), a digital marketing agency headquartered in Tangier with a presence in Dubai and California.