SEO KnowledgeRedirect Path – Our Free Google Chrome Extension Since 2005, I’ve used a very handy tool called Web Sniffer for checking HTTP Headers and bad/chained website redirects. A humble redirect can sometimes decide whether a website ranks or not, capturing link authority from non-existant URLs or stopping Google from indexing a site properly. Tools such as Web Sniffer are very much *reactionary* though, something to prove your initial suspicions about how a website behaves.
That’s where Dan Smith, our brand spanking new (and awesome) Web Developer came in handy. One of Dan’s key responsibilities at Ayima, will be ensuring that our SEO Consultants never have to rely on 3rd party tools, plus always have the most accurate and well presented data to hand. So when Joe and Dave suggested we have a Google Chrome extension to replace our need for Web Sniffer, Dan got to work and produced an awesome tool the following day!
We couldn’t keep this one to ourselves, so Ayima is offering it out to SEOs and Web Developers alike, free of charge. Flagging up 301, 302, 404 and 500 HTTP Status Codes, our Redirect Path plug-in brings attention to potential issues that may not otherwise be seen. As well as flagging up redirects and errors, the plugin also displays other HTTP Headers (such as server types, cookies, caching etc) and the server IP Address at the click of a button. All the magic happens on your computer, so it doesn’t “phone home” to anyone (except when auto-updating itself) and is instantaneous.
Over to Dan, for the quick install guide…
UPDATED: We’ve made installation even easier! Simply visit our Chrome Web Store page and click “Add To Chrome”.
You’re all done! Extension installed. You’ll get a new icon next to the top address bar:
If the plugin detects any redirects or errors, it will change the icon like below:
Clicking the icon will show you further details, including the full redirect chain:
Finally, you can click on any of the items in the path to see any additional headers sent along with that request, including the final successful page request:
Thanks Dan!
Rob was 14 years old when he started his first internet business and made his initial foray into SEO. Since then he has started a second solo web business, worked as Head of SEO for a renowned digital agency, added to th...
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Showing 18 comments
Rob Duckers
Sincerely: thanks for sharing. It’s a useful extension that displays information really clearly.
David
Thanks Dan
Anwar
Great stuff. Another handy tool provided to the community for free.
David Sottimano
Very nice, thank you.
Modesto Siotos
Great job guys!
I’ve been dreaming of such a tool for quite a while now. It will save people loads of time.
Thanks for sharing!
Russ Jones
Awesome works folks, very useful – saves the headache of having to copy and paste URLs into a separate tool that does this. Nice work.
Ben Milleare
Awesome, I was looking for something like this only last week.
Brandon Millard
Looks like I am going to have to change to Chrome now
I look forward to seeing Dan’s future tools.
JaspalX
IMHO, the best redirect checker for chrome. Sometimes I’d just fire up firefox to check headers because I couldn’t find a chrome plugin that I liked…looks like you guys have sorted that out. Thanks Dan
Jonathan Coffey
great tool, great post, easy install instructions. thanks!
Chris
Thank you! (:
Randy
Thanks for the great tool, but I’m having a bit of a dilemma here. I’m being assured that our site and those of our clients are using 301s on the root domain to the www, but this tool keeps telling me they’re all 302s. Any idea why that would be?
Dan Smith
Randy, I’d need to see an example site to be sure but this information comes from Chrome’s internal API’s, so it’s fairly foolproof..
Tom
Great tool guys!
Daryl Cygler
SEO Respect…..
Paul Mc
very nice thanks for sharing
Andy Kuiper
Nice tool, thanks
Martin Oxby
Just came to this site from an excellent SEOMoz article about Redirects – nice to see an extension which is going to be useful and save time, and make redirect checking quick. Just thought I’d point out where your extension got plugged
seomoz.org/blog/url-shortener-owl-li-indexed-in-google
(Feel free to add the actual link if you think it’d be useful to those who land here).
Thanks!