Redirects Advice Please

[DaleZon]

Hi All,

I have been approached by someone to look at their website who has seen a rank drop over the last week of around 15 places.

On a quick look at their website I have seen what I am imaging could be the culprit as I imagine it will be creating a re-direct loop. However, i am not 100% with these things so would like some others opinions.com

They have a wordpress website.

There home page lets say https://theirsite.com/

They have an internal page built for a search term https://www.theirsite.com/keyword

In wordpress they have set that page in settings to be the homepage.

However, I looked on their server and via htaccess they have a 301 redirect from https://www.theirsite.com/keyword to https://www.theirsite.com/

So the questions are:

1. Could this be creating a loop?

2. The redirect was placed around a week before the rank drop. Could this possibly be the cause of the drop?

3. I am assuming that removing the 301 from htaccess is recommended?

Thanks in advance for any advice

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Dale

If that loop you have specified there was true then the homepage wouldn't show up.

https://www.theirsite.com/keyword>https://www.theirsite.com/>https://www.theirsite.com/keyword ad infinitum...

It would just keep on going and Google wouldn't be able to show the page.

You could use Screaming Frog to check for redirect chains - SEMrush and MOZ also pick them up so scanning the site would be my preferred option before touching it. Failing that I would remove it and see what happens.

Regards Nigel

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi There,

This is a common practice and a very common redirect example. and I have seen them contributing to the homepage/main website authority. You can use it and analyze the impact before making any further changes. I had a client who has a very valuable page with content with a certain keyword, they later on 301 redirected the page to the homepage along with the content, this had a very positive impact for their main page DA for that specific keyword. But, I would recommend testing and analyzing everything before reaching a conclusion.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have further questions.

Regards,

Vijay

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

Inside PHPMyAdmin, Check WP-Options and make sure the website in the 2 spots it's entered are correct.

EjZMoyv.png

[DaleZon]

Thanks. The guy is actually not using cloudflare in this case. His htaccess file is structurally correct, the only issue I am unsure about is the fact that there was a 301 redirect from the page set as front page in wordpress to the homepage url.

Obviously this is not standard practice and I am going to remove it, but I was wondering about peoples opinions to see if that 301 redirect would of been causing a loop.

Thanks again

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

Where I most often see a redirect loop is when someone switches over to CloudFlare on the WordPress platform. If it isn't CloudfFare causing this redirect then the first thing you'll probably want to do is change the .htaccess file name to something else and make sure it's baked up then create a new one. First try this stock base .htaccess:

# BEGIN WordPress
 <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> 
# END WordPress

 Then you go down the checklist

1. Delete the newly created htaccess file and allow WordPress the opportunity to create one on it's own
2. Change the name of the plugins folder to temporarily disable plugins to see if that's the cause
3. change the name of the active theme folder to force the use of a stock theme.

It will very likely be one of those items causing the redirect. The only other thing it could be is if Wordpress just got relocated and is pointing at a different domain. In which case you would need to change that in PHPMyAdmin under WP-Options.