Four 301-redirects from "www.example.com" to "shop.example.com" (am I losing my Google PageRank?)

Question

Some years ago, I started my website with the main domain www.example.com. However, the project ended up being a store under shop.example.com.

I obtained hundreds of links to http://www.example.com, and today (after two years) I found that the redirection is not well-constructed, because there are four 301-redirects from http://www.example.com to https://shop.example.com.

I have two questions:

1. Should I fix urgently this issue of "too many 301-redirects" in order not to lose my Google PageRank?
2. Is there any quick Rewrite Rule for Apache 301-redirect from http://www.example.com to https://shop.example.com?

Answer 1

Well, its been 2 years so urgent is relative, but yes, you want to fix this as each redirect is believed to come with a small loss of "google juice".

Matt Cutts (a google official rep) talked about it being unlikely that Google will follow 4 or more redirects - although that was a while ago (see https://youtu.be/r1lVPrYoBkA?t=165 from about 2:45)

There are multiple ways to set up a redirect in Apache. The easiest one in your code might be - in the Apache config or .htaccess -

  Redirect permanent / https://shop.example.com/

(Ref: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_alias.html#redirectpermanent)