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.
301 redirect hops from non-https and www
-
It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop.
It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain.
The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not
In which case, you could have:
- Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar
- 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page.
Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.
-
Maybe I'm missing something? You can implement an htaccess rewrite rule (or equivalent for your server stack) using regex/host so that essentially
http://example.com/foo OR https://example.com/foo redirect to https://example.com/bar That's the standard approach and serves in one hop. Is there something I'm missing why you're getting into a load balancer etc to accomplish this?P.
-
Hello there,
I´d suggest you to go for the Option 1: two hops.
Google understands well up to 4-5 hops. Matt Cutts said it in these videos:
Can too many redirects from a single URL have a negative effect on crawling? Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site?Also, I think that setting a 301 to a 404, it would give to GoogleBot mixed signals and there could be some cases where you get some links to that 301->404 page and lost that ones.
Best luck!
GR.
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 Redirect in breadcrumb. How bad is it?
Hi all, How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects? We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb. SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404. However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months. could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
Help with force redirect HTTP to HTTPS
Hi, I'm unsure of where I should be putting the following code for one of my Wordpress websites so that they redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS. RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] This is my current htaccess file: *missing
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Easigrass0 -
Switching site from non-www to www
Howdy folks, I've got a website that is roughly 3 months old. I created it as a naked URL as I often prefer the look but I've noticed that a lot of my competition has www and also some of my clients seem to prefer it as well. I feel like switching it to www will be of long-term benefit for my site. The problem is that I currently have several pages with first page rankings and a backlinks. I am wondering what the negative effects of switching it to www would be, and how I can minimize any issues. I am guessing I should do a redirect, and I have access to some of the backlinks so I can change those as well, but is there anything else? Thoughts? I appreciate the feedback!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameswesleyhunt1 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
301 Redirect from ASP.NET to PHP...Is it possible?
Hi all, I'm trying to migrate my current website over to wordpress however my current website is ASP.NET and obviously Wordpress uses PHP. Is it possible to perform a 301 redirect from a asp.net to a php? Or do you need to convert the asp.net language into php? Or something different? I welcome your thoughts? Regards, Thomas Rochford
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoGri0 -
Language Detection redirect: 301 or 302?
We have a site offering a voip app in 4 languages. Users are currently 302 redirected from the root page to /language subpages, depending on their browser language. Discussions about the sense of this aside: Is it correct to use a 302 redirect here or should users be 301 redirected to their respective languages? I don't find any guideline on this whatsoever...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner1 -
303 redirect
Hi, 303 redirect is a good thing or not ? I have a homepage in 2 languages FR and EN > mywebsite.com/fr/ and mywebsite.com/en/. A 303 redirect is on mywebsite.com to mywebsite.com/fr/. Thanks D.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon0 -
Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?
I have a well established domain that's been hit with some penalties. It hasn't been nuked off the map, just downgraded, especially on short-tail, one word type queries. I'm planning on redirecting this domain to another well established domain. The domains already have a history of lots of interlinking and are very similar from a subject matter standpoint. I feel that the penalized domain has been hit with an "over-optimization" of link anchor text penalty (I'm hoping it's algorithmic, but it could be manual). My question is if anyone has ever heard of a penalty like this being transferred to another domain through a 301 redirect. My hope is that the penalty just puts a cap on how much juice the redirect can pass, rather than transferring the penalty to the other domain itself. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOMG1