That's kind of funny... but he's missing a couple of pieces.
Based on his numbers, he is testing this over a fast, low-latency connection. Another thousand redirects aren't a problem there. The problem is over 3G, satellite, etc. where you can easily add 300ms per hop on 3G and double that for satellite.
If you live where I live and 4G is commonly referred to as Faux G, lots of latency there too.
If the redirect involves a DNS lookup, you can double that. So if you redirect the page and you have a lot of redirects for resources too, then it starts to add up over a high-latency connection.
Top tip for using 1:1 redirects: place them last in the file because if the redirect is handled by a regex statement with a last tag, the 1:1 rules won’t be parsed. Problems are easier to diagnose that way.
Actually, I think this is exactly wrong. The problem with this is that the regex matches are going to handle general redirects (http to https, non-www to www, fixing case in Windows, directory moves and so forth).
I went round and round and round with a developer on this a couple years ago trying to explain that you want your redirects in order of decreasing specificity. His redirects were like this
1. http to https
2. non-www to www
3. mixed case to lower case
4. strip extension
5. old page to new page
That meant that if you had a request for
http://example.com/OldPage.aspx it would take 5 hops to get to the right address, at least one of which (non-www to www) requires a DNS lookup.
I finally just had to learn how to speak IIS and write the redirects for him. My principle is that it should take only one redirect to get to the destination. His code was just plain stupid, but if you follow the advice in the SEO Mike article, it is inevitable that you will make two hops.
So to me the rules should be
1.
http://example.com/OldPage.aspx to
https://www.example.com/newpageNow I'm done. I never match the following regex-based rules. And every regex-based rule should be a complete rewrite. The only way I can ensure I always get only one hop is if I put my single-line redirects at the top, then get increasingly general as I go down.
With SEO Mike's practice, there is no practical way to get from
http://example.com/OldPage.aspx to
https://www.example.com/newpage in a single hop.