How many redirects are too many?
-
Hello Everyone,
I currently have a dynamic site and it is my understanding that switching to a static site would be beneficial.
I already have some 301's in place from when my site had a .php extension to the new extension now with ./?... etc. Is it okay to re redirect them? How many redirects are too many?
Thank you in advance for suggestions. Have a Fabulous Friday!
Sandra
-
I agree with Richard, based on your explanation, this is the proper way to do the 301 redirects. Your plan will work just fine.
GWT is Google Webmaster Tools
-
Based on your clarification above about the redirects, you are okay leaving it as is, as long as everything is redirecting properly. It would still be best practice to change the redirects from page 1 > page 3 and page 2 > page 3, so all old redirects point to their newer counterparts.
-
Thank you - that helps!
Sincerely,
Sandra
-
Hi Richard,
Can you elaborate? I don't know what you mean.
Thank you,
Sandra
-
Hi Monica,
What is my GWT? (I'm not a developer.)
With regards to the redirects, I am referring to Page 1 redirecting to Page 2 then redirecting to Page 3.
Story,
Site was first BASIC static, which was great. Then I was told upgrade it., so I upgraded to somewhat dynamic. (so now Page 1 now redirecting to New Page 1).
Then told, site needs to be upgraded again - guess what, this changes my extension again - wasn't told that was going to happen. So now I need to have old Page 1 redirecting to New Page 1, now re-redirect to newer Page 1 - because these two pages previous pages are indexed and getting a little link juice. NOW, I realize I should have stayed static and never gone dynamic; however, with switching back to static, it won't be the same extension as the first static site
Hence, Page 1 now redirecting to New Page 1 to Newer Page and Re Re Redirecting to newest Page 1 because all of the above pages are indexed.
Do I just say FORGET IT, and scratch it all and let me get indexed as site gets crawled, because with all the 'updates' and 'upgrades' I supposedly needed (which I now know I didn't) all of my pages have fallen off of Google Page 1 and I'm lucky with anything is even on Page 2 or 3.
THANK YOU Again!!
-
Hi,
I am quoting you
"I currently have a dynamic site and it is my understanding that switching to a static site would be beneficial. "
My answer would be you can do url rewriting because our purpose to be have static URL e.g example.com/blue-widget not example.com&blue?widget
"I already have some 301's in place from when my site had a .php extension to the new extension now with ./?... etc"
I would not suggest that first of all I don't understand why do you want to redirect from.php to extension with parameters.
How many redirects are too many?
There is no limit but if you are doing chain redirect 2-3 max would be fine not more that that. To more info please watch Matt cutts video on this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA#t=198
Thanks
-
It would be best practice to update the old redirects to the new structure as well.
-
Agree with Monica with a clarification. You shouldn't REmove the the 301 redirects after 6 months if there are incoming links to the old / dynamic URLs UNLESS you've been in touch with link owners and they have agreed to change the link to point to the new permanent URL.
And as Monica states, it's always a good idea to keep your eye on your GWT for 404 errors for any you may have missed.
-
It depends on how the redirects are done. If you do them in the htaccess file and they are dynamic, not manual, you can have thousands. What Kevin is referring to is how many times can you redirect the same page. You can't redirect page 1 to page 2 to page 3 to page 4 then to page 5. But you can redirect multiple pages on you site.
I understand from your previous post you are talking about your blog. You will be fine redirecting these URLs to static URLs. Do them through the HTAccess file. After about 6 months the old URLs should have fallen off and been removed from the index so you can move the 301 redirects. If anything gets missed you will find it in your GWT 404 errors.
-
A couple will be fine. Anything more than that may be problematic. In 2011, Matt Cutts stated anything more than five and Googlebot will not follow it.
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
-
So many links from single site?
this guy is ranking on all high volume keywords and has low quality content, he has 1600 ref domains check the attachment how did he get so many links from single site is he gonna be penalized YD2BvQ0
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
How can i solve this redirect chain issue?
Hey, can somebody explain to me how can I solve this redirect chain issue? I tried redirecting /contact-us directly to **/contact/ **but this causes a chain of redirects of infinite dimensions. I don't know how to find the old redirect and delete it. Is there such an option? Thank you! byA7l
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Popos1 -
All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself
Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!0 -
301 redirect with DNS?
Quick question. Is it possible to 301 redirect a non-www to www. (properly in terms of SEO) with DNS (C Name, A name, or other) ..have searched around and found conflicting information. Would like to know a definite answer. I usually implement all 301 redirects with htaccess. However have a client situation where we only have access to the CMS, but which does have DNS settings. thanks in advance, Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregDixson0 -
Googlebot being redirected but not users?
Hi, We seem to have a slightly odd issue. We noticed that a number of our location category pages were slipping off 1 page, and onto page 2 in our niche. On inspection, we noticed that our Arizona page had started ranking in place of a number of other location pages - Cali, Idaho, NJ etc. Weirdly, the pages they had replaced were no longer indexed, and would remain so, despite being fetched, tweeted etc. One test was to see when the dropped out pages had been last crawled, or at least cached. When conducting the 'cache:domain.com/category/location' on these pages, we were getting 301 redirected to, you guessed it, the Arizona page. Very odd. However, the dropped out pages were serving 200 OK when run through header checker tools, screaming frog etc. On the face of it, it would seem Googlebot is getting redirected when it is hitting a number of our key location pages, but users are not. Has anyone experienced anything like this? The theming of the pages are quite different in terms of content, meta etc. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers0 -
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect
Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
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 -
How to do a 301 redirect for url's with this structure?
In an effort to clean up my url's I'm trying to shorten them by using a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file. How would I set up a rule to grab all urls with a specific structure to a new shorter url examples: http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/other-reviews/item/article-title http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/article-title So in the example above dynamically redirect all url's with /articles/reviews/other-reviews/item/ in it to /reviews/ so http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/boat-reviews/item/1550-review-nucanoe-frontier http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/other-reviews/item/1551-review-spyderco-salt http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/fishing-gear-reviews/item/1524-slayer-inc-sinister-swim-tail would be... http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/1550-review-nucanoe-frontier http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/1551-review-spyderco-salt http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/1524-slayer-inc-sinister-swim-tail with one 301 redirect rule in my .htaccess file.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mr_w0