Is it a problem to have too many 301 redirects within your site
-
my website is translated into 10+ languages, but our news articles are often only published in 1-2 languages. Currently, URLs are created in the unpublished news languages that then 301 redirect the user to main news page since the content doesnt exist in that language.
Is this implementation okay or is there a preferred method we should be using so that we don't have a large number of pages on the site with redirects?
Thanks!
-
What you are doing seems proper - and it sounds like you're only doing one hop, you just don't want to daisy chain 301's or you'll lose some page rank being passed.
-
That is assuming he is using apache. When using a webserver like nginx that has the rewrites in the config file the performance loss is neglible as opposed to reading from an.htaccess file at every pageload.
-
I would look at how you can stop the issue occurring, it is working well for you now but in 5 years what will it be like?
If you are able to modify the CMS now it may solve a bigger problem down the line
Hope that helps
Sean
-
It might not work so well in the long run.
Your HTACCESS file will get very big slowing down the redirect process. I cant say how long it would take, but the bigger your htaccess file, the slower the redirects.
-
This shouldn't be a problem.
I'm guessing the URLs are automatically generated when you create the news story? If so, then you're handling it the best way I could think of. The only other thing, of course, would be not to create the URL to begin with in these countries, but I have no idea how your CMS works.
But to be honest, I think you're handling it just right.
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
-
Can I undo a 301 redirect? Will it penalize my ranking?
I'm in charge of building a website for a company that made a mess. They own domain xxx.it (xxx is not the real domain, just a placeholder). Some years ago they 301 redirected xxx.it to xxx.com (they just changed TLDs). Last year they 301 redirected xxx.com to yyy.com (so, they actually changed domains). Now, after 13 months, the company failed and the new leadership wants me to undo everything and 301 redirect from yyy.com to xxx.it. So: 301 redirect is permanent. So, conceptually it's wrong to undo it. What happens if I undo it? Will my ranking be penalized, even if a significant amount of time has passed (13 months)? Will crawlers detect a loop (even if i remove any 301 redirect from xxx.it and theorically break the loop)? Here is the potential loop: xxx.it -> xxx.com -> yyy.com -> xxx.it -> etc... All of the articles I found on the web are quite old and not clear about this topic, that's why I'm asking this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naska19900 -
Client would like to 301 redirect the homepage to a category page
Hello MOZ Community!!! I would like your expert opinions on a scenario, please! My client is an ecommerce company, and currently has one of its category pages outranking its homepage for a few key phrases. The homepage, however, has a better conversion rate. So, the client is asking that we make the homepage the category URL, so http://www.theirsite.com/blue-clothes. The existing homepage URL - http://www.theirsite.com - would 301 REDIRECT to the category page - which would render the current version of the homepage. Therefore, there would be nothing, ZERO content, on the MAIN URL: http://www.theirsite.com Has anyone ever done this before? What are the pros and the cons of this practice? Here is my same client, for reference: https://moz.com/community/q/issue-with-category-ranking-on-page-1-vs-homepage-ranking-on-page-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Persistent listings or 301 redirects better for SEO?
Imagine these 2 scenarios for an ecommerce listing. 1. A listing that only closes once stock runs out 2. A listing that relists every 7 days assuming stock has run out and doing a 301 redirect to the latest version of that listing (imagine it relists several times) You might ask why on earth we would have the 2nd scenario, but we are an auction site where some listings can't be bid on. In other words those Buy Now only listings are also part of the auction model - they close after 7 days. For me it is a no-brainer that scenario 1 is better for SEO, and I have my ideas on why this is better for SEO than the second scenario such as age, SERP CTR, link equity not being diluted by 301 redirects not changing every 7 days when the listing relists multiple times etc. I was wondering if someone could articulate better than I possibly could why scenario 1 is better for SEO, and why scenario 1 would rank better in the SERPS....would it? Many thanks! Cheers, Simon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sichristie0 -
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
301 redirect subdomain to path and 301 for popular pages
We have very popular pages that have many backlinks. www.chezmaya.com/jeux/game33.htm have so many backlinks and it's very popular. Now If i'm moving this page to a new path like : http://www.chezmaya.com/jeux/component/mtree/Défouloir/Game33/details.html with a 301. Your SEOmoz toolbar is now giving a very low PA:1 and mR:0.00 for this new page. My question is after you crawl my site again would you change the values to what /jeux/game33.htm got before ? We used to have jeux.chezmaya.com and moved to www.chezmaya.com/jeux/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SocialGeekMedia
Same here PA:1 and mR:0.00 for this page. Also Matt Cutts say that Google does transfer the juice from the old page to the new one. I already saw one url changed in a search for puzzle, it's at the same position it was before, but it say's 6 days ago beside. So I wonder if this is temporary and it will move with time? Thanks0 -
Is there anything wrong with this 301 redirect?
I'll keep this one short and sweet 🙂 Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL. The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results. This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages. I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Effect of 301 redirect to a relative url to homepage?
One of our new clients recently encountered a site-wide ranking drop for many keywords and I'm pretty confident regarding their link profile as to being 98% legit. Background: 1. Client full site is https, and all http pages are 301 redirected to their https counterpart 2. Client has ~50 links partners (all legitimate sites + schools etc) links to client with urls such as www.example.com/portal/123.aspx that redirects to www.example.com. 3. Client homepage 301 redirects from www.example.com to www.example.com/default.aspx and then 301 redirects to the relative url "/Home.aspx". 4. Client launched some testing with Google website optimizer tool. ~1-2 months ago. Symptoms: 1. Rankings dropped for basically many/all 30-40+ keywords by ~15 positions 2. Seomoz reports close to a double of existing pages + (600+) duplicate content in the same date range. Webmasters only report 80 duplicate titles though. 3. Domain authority by seomoz reduced a bit + backlinks recorded by seomoz to the website nearly halved in the past 2 months. I'm not sure if I narrowed this towards the right direction, and it isn't clear when the relative url 301 redirect was implemented: 1. The 301 redirect to the relative page (www.example.com/default.aspx to "/home.aspx") is accounting for the loss of links recorded by seomoz. 2. The ~50 links the client currently use (www.example.com/portal.123.aspx 301 redirecting to www.example.com, also relative) as a tracking tool is being considered 301 redirect abuse. 3. Maybe something went wrong with the usage of google optimizer tool for SEO purposes? Visitor traffic to each of the tested pages looked fine. I would greatly appreciate any advice/insights on what I might be missing in terms of direction / factors. Thanks! Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sixspokemedia0 -
Redirection to mobile site
Calling all SEO ninjas! I'm currently developing single web pages for various clients which function as abbreviated versions of their main websites. They are all related & under a single domain. When a user visits these pages on a mobile device, CSS is used to display mobile friendly versions of these pages. My clients are thrilled with these mobile versions and now want to also redirect mobile visitors from their main site (which is not mobile optimised) to these pages. My questions are: Are there any negative implications if we did this? ie. redirecting to a different domain What is the best method for redirection? eg. JavaScript Can this be achieved by adding a single line of code to their main site Can this be done in an SEO friendly way so that the redirection acts like a backlink? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martyc0