No redirect chains longer than one hop

Every extra redirect hop costs ~500ms of crawler wait and burns one of Googlebot's retry slots — chains longer than one hop often get abandoned mid-traversal, leaving the final destination unindexed. Temporary 302/307 codes prevent PageRank consolidation entirely, so old URLs keep their equity while the new URL ranks from scratch. The compounding effect tanks migration projects and kills redirected link equity.

Flatten every chain to a single 301 hop and delete intermediate redirects from next.config.js. Audit with curl -IL to verify status codes:

// next.config.js
module.exports = {
  async redirects() {
    return [{ source: '/old-product', destination: '/products/item', permanent: true }]
  }
}