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I have this situation:

  1. I had some uppercase URLs that I wanted to change with lowercase versions.
  2. I implemented 301 redirect from uppercase to lowercase
  3. Since my server is running behind Nginx, redirection happened with HTTP
  4. Nginx do 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS

So I have two 301 redirects, one for uppercase/lowercase issue and one for HTTP/HTTPS issue. Can this multiple 301 redirects effect the SEO? Should I refactor the logic to have only one 301 redirect?

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Short redirect chains might slightly hurt SEO, but probably have no effect. If it is easy for you to change the logic to have a single redirect, then go ahead and do so. If it is difficult, or duplicates logic then I wouldn't bother.

If your site used to be HTTP with uppercase URLs and you have lots of inbound links to those URLs, search engines will have to process two redirects instead of one to pass that link equity through to your site. Search engines are willing to do that. They follow redirect chains that are five redirects long with no problems. There is an old debate as to whether each redirect hop causes a small amount of link equity to get lost. That debate has never fully been settled, but I now think there is no loss of link juice through redirects.

If you don't have external links that point to HTTP uppercase URLs, there is no reason to worry about whether multiple redirects will hurt SEO because search engines will rarely encounter the redirect chains.

If your site has HSTS enabled, you shouldn't redirect directly from the HTTP uppercase URLs to HTTPS lowercase URLs. HSTS is a configuration setting that has browsers automatically convert HTTP to HTTPS without ever hitting your server. Some top level domains (like .dev) have the setting enabled for every domain name under that TLD. When HSTS is enabled, HTTP URLs are supposed to redirect to the exact same URL but with HTTPS.

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  • Yeah the 301 juice debate has not ever really been settled. No matter what John says people don't believe it. You are (most likely) correct tho...I've tested it by simulating models with the PR algo and doing the math. I would have to dumpster dive through a box of old drives to find the data tho, and then pray to Pearson it is significant. I love everything about this answer...spot on.
    – Mike Ciffone
    Dec 1, 2021 at 15:43
  • Anecdotally (and thus not worthy of an answer but rather this comment), I've had to have multiple 301 redirects on pages before. My traffic dropped 10% for about a week but then returned to normal. @MikeCiffone is right: This has never been settled and probably never will be. There are too many other factors that matter (quality of inbound links, age of domain with the same IP, content quality, Mercury being in retrograde, etc)
    – Trav
    Dec 1, 2021 at 19:40

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