Multiple 301 redirects considered a redirection chain?
-
I need to redirect a ton of duplicate content, so I want to try
redirect 301 /store/index.php /store
redirect 301 /store/product-old /store/product-new
redirect 301 /store/product-old1 /store/product-new1
redirect 301 /store/product-old2 /store/product-new2
redirect 301 /store/product-old3 /store/product-new3
redirect 301 /store/product-old4/file.html /store/product-old4/new4/file.html
and then a whole bunch of old dead links to homepage.
So we've had /index.php redirected to / on other parts of the site for awhile, and for the most part /store is a friendly URL, but then we have tons of dup content and work arounds that preceded my job here. I'm wondering if those redirects above would be considered a redirection chain? Since the all the redirects below the /index.php -> /store count on that one redirect.
Thanks for any insight you may be able to give!
-
301 redirecting an old, no longer existing page to the homepage or any other page (I'd suggest using the closest matching existing page) is certainly not a violation of google's guidelines.
-
As far as 'header redirect' are you talking about a meta refresh redirect rather than a 301 htaccess redirect? I thought meta refresh redirects were not necessarily a good thing to do in the eyes of search engines?
Also, isn't redirecting a URL of a page that no longer exists to the home page actually a violation of Google's guidelines?
I'm currently doing a project to resolve many 404s being reported in Google Webmaster account.
Many of them are simply malformed URLs (live URLs with a period at the end or a comma or an equal sign, etc.) from the referrer's side - yet some carry a vaulable backlink authority, so they should be 301'd, in my opinion to the intended URL, when that is obvious.
However, if there is no longer a close match page - say for an old but valued backlink - to ideally redirect to, is it OK to - in attempt to retain the backlink value - redirect what are really 404 pages to the homepage or a top landing page? If so, is there a limit to the number of redirects to resolve a 404?
Thanks for any clarification of the issue raised above.
-
Ask if you can do header code injection where you can dump code blocks in the header.
-
Yeah I might have to seek help on the magento boards.
-
WP has to have a 404 handler someplace in their admin section. At least the dead pages you can redirect, but I do not know if WP will 301 those.
Then yes, you have to use your .htaccess file to shift those pages. What a mess! Write them all down and carefully map them out. I would still test the page to see if it has any inbound links, if not, I might let the 404 handler handle that link to save editing.
I would also as WP or Magento or their message boards if any of them have this same problem and see if there are any plug-in fixes.
-
There are both indexed and internally linked urls that need to be redirected properly. Using two CMS's WP and Magento and I'm not too much of a php wiz so I really am not following. besides the product pages still being linked there are like 1000 more 404 pages that need to be redirected to the homepage. Would mod rewrite be better here?
And Barry, yes I guess so, just found out about it, trying to understnad wth is goin on here. Looks like mage redirects a couple times on its own as well? Who knows, it's puttin me to sleep lol. Hopefully I can find out more tomorrow. Thanks for the answers guys +1
-
Are you using Magento's funny built in redirect tool? I've never really understood how that worked
-
Wow, this is not fun
Yes, you can get down the chain too many times and your browser just pukes. And likely Google will give up.
- Test the OLD page(2) to see if it has any inbound links or page authority. If not, then a redirect is not necessary. Yes, the page still might be indexed, but I would do a header redirect with a 301 instead of using the .htaccess file. It is on the fly and much cleaner.
Depending on how your site is coded, you can test the page in PHP.
- Find incoming URL
- Test against database
- Send to new location
Simply take the incoming URL and pull the location in the _HEADER. Then look at your database that you set up with all these redirects. Then redirect the user to the new page and 301 the redirect in the header.
All the work you do is then in the database. Look at Google Webmaster for 404 pages and adjust the database. I would also then state that if I found no URL within the database (good or old) then I would redirect to the home page and 301 that. This way you do not lose any link juice and keep your 301 chain down to one dynamic hop.
I hope that helps
-
No trouble I'm quick with the mouse. That's why I like doin this stuff around 4am haha. Thanks anyway Barry.
You might be onto something, it's magento which I have limited to no knowledge of how it redirects, I'm sure that's the deal I'll look into it but after I need sleep soooo tired
-
I might bow out gracefully before I get you in any more trouble But I'll see what I can replicate and test What would be the raw URL of the electronics pages?
Is it actually rewriting from something like /store/index.php?id=electronics or is it /store/electronics.php (or even /store/electronics/index.php)? Or are you on a CMS that make it hard to tell?
-
redirect 301 /store/index.php /store
redirect 301 /store/electronics1 /store/electronics
that's pretty much it
-
Talk me through it again then, please.
You're trying to get to /store/product-new1 and you're getting a 310?
Did I get the redirect thing mixed up and actually there's another redirect because the real URL would be /store/product-new1/index.php?
-
Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects.
-
Yeah there's certain cases, sometimes all, where /old will go through the first /index.php redirect to be able to get to /new
Yeah I guess you have a point, but for some reason it feels wrong. Google hasn't crawled this site for almost a month lol. So when it finally does, everything's gonna be so different it might just be like AHHH.
Thanks for the help.
-
If I understand correctly I'm going to say no (with a low degree of certainty :D).
So /store/product-old1 you are assuming already goes through /store/index.php?id=product-old1 (or similar) to produce that first url?
So to get to /store/product-new1 from a link to /store/product-old1 you're wondering how many steps your .htaccess puts it through?
I'll have to let somebody with better .htaccess skills than mine confirm, but I think it's all resolved as one, in sequence, if it's on the same server (and set up correctly). I'm maybe talking nonsense though.
However if it was a chain then, for example, somebody going to my WordPress site using mysite.com/page1 would end up at www.mysite.com/redirected-page1/ and after hitting about 4 redirects (www, permalinks, redirect and trailing slash) and I've not seen anything to suggest that it's a problem.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301 redirecting to anchor points
A client has just given me a list of redirect URLs as requested of them. However, they're wanting to redirect a bunch of pages to various anchor points within the same page. For example: /pages/about might redirect to: /pages/our-story#our-mission And: /pages/history might redirect to: /pages/our-story#history Is there any problem with this? I've never seen or been asked to redirect like this before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Pull multiple link data for multiple pages at once?
Hi guys, I was wondering if there is a tool or way to pull link data for a list of URLs/Pages at once to one single file with ahrefs or majestic. I know scrapebox can do this with OSE, but looking for a way to do this with the other backlink databases. Any ideas? Cheers. Hi guys, I was wondering if there is a tool or way to pull link data for a list of URLs/Pages at once to one single file with ahrefs or majestic. I know scrapebox can do this with OSE, but looking for a way to do this with the other backlink databases. Any ideas? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Several 301 Redirects to Same Page
Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,0 -
Multilingual Redirection
Hey there awesome Mozzers, I have a site that it automatically redirects people by using geolocation ( i know that probably is not good ) to the various languages of the site. I just wanted to know Is 301 or 302 the best option? ( I've heard that for language re-directions 302 is the best case scenario ) My main page for example is www.example.com and it automatically redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en for any language that is not there. What is the best case scenario? Leave it to redirect to /en or just leave it go to the root page www.example.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
HTTPS Login on HTTP Site | 301 or 302 Redirect?
I've searched the forum on this and online and can't seem to find a definitive answer. Some e-commerce sites that are http use a 302 redirect to the https login while other sites use a 301 redirect. I know 302 is generally not recommended but in this case it may make sense. Can anyone advise on the correct practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CallMeNicholi0 -
URL Structure Change - 301 Redirect - on large website
Hi Guys, I have a website which has approximately 15 million pages indexed. We are planning to change url structure of 99.99% of pages but it would remain on same domain. eg: older url: xyz.com/nike-shoes; new url: xyx.com/shopping/nike-shoes A benefit that we would get is adding a related and important keyword in url. We also achieve other technical benefits in identifying the page type before hand and can reduce time taken to serve the pages (as per our tech team). For older URLs, we are planning to do a 301 redirect. While this seems to be the correct thing to do as per Google, we do see that there is a very large number of cases where people have suffered significantly on doing something like this : Here are our questions: Will all page rank value will be passed to new url? (i.e. will there be a 100% passing of PR/link juice to the new URLs) Can it lower my rank for keywords? (currently we have pretty good rankings (1-5) on many keywords) If there is an impact on rankings - will it be only on specific keywords or will we see a sitewide impact? Assuming that we have taken a hit on traffic, How much time would it take to get the traffic back to normal? and if traffic goes down, by what percentage it may go down and for how much time. (best case, average case and worst case scenarios) Is there anything I should keep in mind while doing this? I understand that there are no clear answers that can be given to these questions but we would like to evaluate a worst case/best case situation. Just to give context : Even a 10 day downtime in terms of drops in rankings is extremely detrimental for our business.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Myntra0 -
Redirect 301
Hi, I `m redirecting some pages in htaccess The first 15 pages that i redirected it worked. But the last 3 dont work, and i cant figure it out why it is not working. Redirect 301 /analyseverktoy/ /webanalyse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SGacic
Redirect 301 /index.php/ledige-stillinger/ /
Redirect 301 /?page_id=352/ / Anu suggestions?0 -
External links point to 403 page - how to 301 redirect if no file extension?
Hi guys, After moving from an old static .htm site to Wordpress, I 301'd all old .htm urls fine to the new trailing slash foldery style /wordpress-urls/ in htaccess no problem. But Google Webmaster Tools tells me I still have hundreds of external links pointing to a similar version of the old urls (but without the .htm), giving lots of not founds and 403s. Example of the urls linked to that 403 not found: http://www.mydomain.com/filename So I'm wondering how I do a 301 redirect from a non-exisiting url that also has no file extention as above and is not like a folder? This seems like a lot of possible external link juice to lose. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0