Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is there a limit to Internal Redirect?
-
I know Google says there is no limit to it but I have seen on many websites that too many 301 redirects can be a problem and might negatively affect your rankings in SERPs.
I wanted to know especially from people who worked on large ecommerce site. How do they manage internal redirect from one URL to other and how many according to you are too many. I mean if you get a website that contain 300 plus 301 redirections within the website, how will you deal with that?
Please let me know if the question is not clear.
-
Right. Chain redirects = bad.
However, in the same video of Matt Cutts, he does say that the overall amount doesn't matter, and that's what I was talking about in first part of my previous answer.
Now, let's crunch some numbers to show you that the number of no-chain redirects doesn't matter.
-
Assume that we are in perfect world, so all given manufacturer given numbers actually right and all operations per second are actually operations per second
-
Lets say that standard hosting server is 2GHz power = 2*10^9 computations per second
-
Since all htaccess work/computations are strictly on a server side (bots/browsers just send request to server for response if page should be redirected), the only time which can slow down the request is server response time.
-
Match computations are always considered low computation power processes.
-
so, let's say you have htacces with 1 000 000 redirect rules, server keeps it in memory to do match computations when bots make requests, it means that 2GHz server has to have 2000 requests per second to just START struggling.
So, do you have 2000 requests per second to your website and 1 million redirect rules?
P.S. All number above are very rough approximations
P.P.S. If you really wanna see if your server is/ would struggle - login into web host manager, go to server status and info, look and see how much of your server power is usually being used. Usually that number is lower than 6-7% at 90% of the time.
Hope this clarify some things
-
-
I am going to say what I do and how I think that it works. I am not saying that this is correct or best practice.
When I abandon a URL I do not place the redirect in the .htaccess file in the root directory. Instead, I place an .htaccess file in the folder where the URL was saved. That limits the size of my .htaccess file in the root directory. I believe that reduces the amount of work that your server must do, it does not need to examine a very large .htaccess file.
If you use many folders to categorize your content then you will have small .htaccess files that are easier to manage. From time to time you will be able to redirect entire folders instead of individual files when you abandon a product line or a category of content.
That's what I do.
-
I think you get me wrong, you are talking probably talking about chain redirects as in from a to b and than b to c and may be d. For this Matt himself said in one of his Webmaster videos that Google might not crawl the link after 2 or may be 3 stages.
I am more concern about redirects in total because redirect increase the page load time and page load time is a factor in Google rankings which make me think again before go ahead and set 1000+ redirection (for example)!
But thanks for your reply!
-
I've not seen any instances of a limit to how many redirects you can have pointing to your website. I have some clients who have thousands of redirects in place (lots of old pages being moved to a new version of that product). Those sites haven't had any issues with rankings at all. In fact, many of the links pointing to the sites still reference the URLs that are redirected and those pages that are redirected to are ranking perfectly fine.
The biggest limit I've seen is on chaining. I've seen issues where chained redirects simply aren't followed. However, if you can keep it to a 1 step redirect, or 2, then things should be okay. It doesn't sound like that is what you are asking about though. More from Matt Cutts on this:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-discusses-301-permanent-redirects-limits-on-websites/46611/In terms of managing those redirects, you can't usually keep this many on an htaccess file without going a little bit nuts (or risking some future dev deleting those in an effort to clean up the htaccess file - ug). If you are using WordPress, the 301 redirects plugin works quite well: https://wordpress.org/plugins/301-redirects/
Unfortunately, I've also run into sites that aren't in a CMS where you can use a plugin. In those cases, I usually put these redirects in a database table. On the 404 file, I then have the code check the would-be error URL to see if we need to redirect that URL somewhere else. If a redirect is place, it redirects instead of throwing the 404 error. If no redirect is in place, the code then throws a 404 error.
Hope that helps.
-
Hello, my friend.
Well, whenever people says "don't have too many redirects", it doesn't mean not to have too many redirects in total count, for example, if you have old page
a.php redirected to b.php,
and old page c.php redirected to d.php
and so on - there is no any problem. However, what they mean is not to have consecutive redirects - eg.:a.php redirects to b.php, which redirects to c.php, which redirects to d.php, instead of a.php redirecting to d.php straight forward.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Redirection chain and Javascript Redirect
Hi, A redirection chain is usually defined as a page redirecting to another page which itself is another redirection. URL1 ---(301/302)---> URL2 ---(301/302)---> URL3 But what about Javascript redirect? They seem to be a different beast: URL1 ---(301/302)---> URL2 ---(200 then Javascript redirect)---> URL3 From what I know if the javascript redirect is instant Google counts it as a 301 permanent redirection, but I'm still not sure about if this counts as a redirection chain. Most of the tools (such as moz) only see the first redirection. So is that scenario a redirection chain or no?
Technical SEO | | LouisPortier0 -
Http to https redirection issue
Hi, i have a website with http but now i moved to https. when i apply 301 redirection from http to https & check in semrush it shows unable to connect with https & similar other tool shows & when i remove redirection all other tools working fine but my https version doesn't get indexed in google. can anybosy help what could be the issue?
Technical SEO | | dhananjay.kumar10 -
Redirect and ranking issue
Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!
Technical SEO | | rwat0 -
Backlinks that go to a redirected URL
Hey guys, just wondering, my client has 3 websites, 2 of 3 will be closed down and the domains will be permanently redirected to the 1 primary domain - however they have some high quality backlinks pointing the domains that will be redirected. How does this effective SEO? Domain One (primary - getting redesign and rebuilt) - not many backlinks
Technical SEO | | thinkLukeSEO
Domain Two (will redirect to Domain One) - has quality backlinks
Domain Three (will redirect to Domain One) - has quality backlinks When the new website is launched on Domain One I will contact the backlink providers and request they update their URL - i assume that would be the best.0 -
What to do with 302 redirects being indexed
Hi there, Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor. For example: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/ In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL; en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/ (there is no content here, and never has been). This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links. Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting. Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable. But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index? Is the canonical tag the best way? I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | etruvian0 -
Delete 301 redirected pages from server after redirect is in place?
Should I remove the redirected old pages from my site after the redirects are in place? Google is hating the redirects and we have tanked. I did over 50 redirects this week, consolidating content and making one great page our of 3-10 pages with very little content per page. But the old pages are still visible to google's bot. Also, I have not put a rel canonical to itself on the new pages. Is that necessary? Thanks! Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
How to Redirect only specific pages to new domain
My HTACCESS FILE IS AS FOLLOWS: rewriteengine on
Technical SEO | | askthetrainer
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$
rewriterule ^mydomain/(.*)$ "http://www.mydomain.com/$1" [R=301,L] #4d864805b49b5 I want to move ONLY specific pages from this domain to a new domain How do I edit my HTACCESS (which redirects http:// to www.) to move specific pages from old domain (which I have to delete) to new domain.... I.e. http://mydomaon.com/move.html needs to move to http://mynewdomain.com/move.html Where i can delete the original domains0