Why the redirect chain matters
Every extra redirect hop adds a round trip before a visitor (or a search engine crawler) reaches the final page, which slows things down and can dilute SEO value passed through the chain. Tracing it hop by hop shows exactly how many redirects are involved, whether they're the right type (a permanent 301 versus a temporary 302 matters for SEO), and where a broken or looping redirect is actually failing.
Why a long redirect chain is worth fixing even when it technically still works
A chain that eventually reaches the right page still costs real load time at every hop, and search engines have been known to follow only a limited number of redirects before giving up - a chain that's merely slow for a human visitor can become a dead end for a crawler, which is why collapsing multiple hops down to a single direct redirect is generally worth the effort even when nothing is technically broken yet.
Why the status code at each hop matters as much as the destination
A 301 and a 302 can lead to the exact same final URL while meaning very different things to a search engine - a 301 passes ranking signal to the new URL as a permanent move, while a 302 tells search engines the original URL should stay the one indexed. Using the wrong type for a genuinely permanent change can leave outdated ranking signals pointing at a URL you don't actually want indexed anymore.
Why the trace stops rather than following a redirect loop forever
A misconfigured server can create a redirect loop that would otherwise never terminate - stopping the trace after a fixed number of hops and reporting the likely loop gives you an actionable diagnosis instead of the tool hanging indefinitely trying to reach a destination that doesn't exist.