(Entry was posted by Jason Hyungchul Kang on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 02/01/2018).

Is this considered a re-direct chain?

When I go to a client`s homepage it goes from http://xyz.com/ -> https://www.xyz.com/ -> http://www.xyz.com/en-us -> and then to https://www.xyz.com/en-us. Is this considered a re-direct chain and is this a big problem?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Jason Duke: yes it is a redirect chain.... It may or may not be a problem and it may or may not be a big one.
Paul Thompson: Yup, somebody goofed in integrating the redirects. It slows down page load slightly to process the unnecessary redirects, and the switching back and forth from HTTP to HTTPS, back to HTTP and then to HTTPS again is almost certainly going to bork the analytics, and adds potentially risky extra complexity.
Jim Munro: Consider that googlebot does not crawl sequentially. It calls a url and records the response. Another googlebot (or that googlebot) will come back later to follow the links in that response. If the result is only a redirect, where is your benefit from that encounter?
George G.: just make separate directives for the 3 other versions to point to https://www.xyz.com/en-us and you ll be good.
Alan Bleiweiss: Every redirect injects friction in the process. Friction we can eliminate is friction that needs to be eliminated when following best practices that work to ensure no problems arise due to that friction. Also, are they 301 redirects or 302? Because that is problem point #2 if they are 302.
Yuliana Kronrod: One consideration - to enable HSTS proload, http://xyz.com/ should first go to https://xyz.com/ and only then to www: https://www.xyz.com/.