I've put in place lots of different 301 rules to deal with numerous url changes.

And for certain URLS there are 3-4 different 301 redirects landing the visitors to the new URL.

I heard that 301 loses pagerank/linkjuice. ALl the 301 are onsite for the same domain. With a mix of php 301s and htaccess 301s.

Does google see more than one 301 redirect? or are the multiple 301s dealt be the server, and google only sees one.

for instance

articles/news.php?id=2 ---> articles/blog.php?id=2
articles/* ---> /*
/blog.php?id=2 ---> /title-of-post [mod rewrite]

so if you were to visit /articles/news.php?id=2 there will be two 301 redirects until you land on the page you're after, my question is does google see two redirects or just one?

Why not tell us?

Check your logs to see what is being requested by visitor and search engines.

Thanks foe the thread move and feedback chris, it's not appropriate to pose the url here, that's why I kept the details of the site anonymous as possible.

I'm not really sure how to make sense of the site logs, all I'm asking though is are php and htaccess 301 deal with server side or client side.

We don't really need a URI anyway as it won't really tell us anything.

You could use a log analyser such as FunnelWeb or you may have Webaliser or Awstats installed on your hosting account.

You could also install Google Analytics and sign up to Google Webmaster Tools to see what errors and redirects Google encounters. But ultimately only your logs will give the whole picture of HTTP Requests and responses from ALL user agents.