Where does this URL actually end up?

A redirect chain is the sequence of hops a URL takes before it lands on a final page: http to https, a trailing slash added, an old path forwarded to a new one. Every hop is a round trip. A crawler with a limited fetch budget for your site can give up partway through a long chain, and a slow chain is a slow experience for a real visitor too. This is about crawler clarity and latency, not a ranking factor.

A 301 says this moved permanently, and is the right choice for a page you have relocated for good. A 302 says this moved temporarily, meant for short-lived redirects like a sale page or an A/B test. 307 and 308 are the newer, stricter versions of 302 and 301 that require the same HTTP method be reused on the next hop, which mostly matters for form submissions and APIs. For a normal page move, a 301 is almost always the honest answer.

A <link rel=canonical> tag on a page tells crawlers which URL is the authoritative version when the same or very similar content is reachable at more than one address, think a page with tracking parameters, a print view, or a paginated duplicate. It is a signal, not a redirect: the duplicate URLs still load, but crawlers are told to treat the canonical URL as the one that counts.

Usually, yes. A page's canonical pointing at its own final URL is the default and correct setup for almost every standalone page. The honest exceptions are things like syndicated content that canonicalizes back to the original publisher, or a filtered or paginated view that canonicalizes to the main unfiltered page. If you did not choose one of those cases on purpose, a canonical pointing elsewhere is worth checking.

It is a quiet, easy-to-miss mistake: the page loads fine for a human visitor, but the canonical tag tells crawlers and AI engines that the real content lives at a different URL. If that is not what you intended, this page effectively tells crawlers to ignore it in favor of somewhere else, which means it will not get crawled, indexed, or cited on its own merits no matter how good the content is.

Our server follows the URL's redirect chain one hop at a time, exactly the way a crawler would, then reads the final page's title, canonical tag, and og:url. Nothing about the URL or the page content is stored: the check runs, the result is returned to your browser, and that is it.