How Critical to Address Redirect Chains?
-
We have about 100 redirect chains and were not sure of the impact they are having on our SEO.
One SEO expert wants to charge around $800 to clean these up for us.
Any thoughts on how serious of an issue this is and how important it is to address?
-
If you understand html and SEO, then this could be an "in-house" job, otherwise hire only a professional that can be held accountable. Make certain of your wishes/needs and document that both parties understand the need and expected results.
$800 is not much money to have your site professionally repaired.
KJr
-
Hi there!
Im not sure wherer your problem is that a few URLs have 100s redirects or that you have 100s URLs with some redirect chains. Whatever the case keep in mind that Google understands well up to 4-5 hops.
You might/might not need the services from a SEO expert/agency, as long as you have recognized those chains, work with your dev team to reduce the amount of redirections.One hint: Go one chain at a time, find all the URLs in that chain and analyze each of them. Look for inbound links to that URLs, traffic or any important aspect that if if you remove that URL/redirect might hurt your website.
Other hint: Do not remove that URL and let it be 404. Try shorten the chain and the extracted URLs point them to other page, of course be sure that they are related and it helps users.To back what i'm saying: 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?Hope it helps.
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
-
Redirects Being Removed...
Hi We have a team in France who deal with the backend of the site, only problem is it's not always SEO friendly. I have lots of 404's showing in webmaster tools and I know some of them have previously had redirects. If we update a URL on the site, any links pointing to it on the website are updated straight away to point to the most up to date URL - so the user doesn't have to go through a redirect. However, the team would see this as the redirect not being 'used' after about 30 days and remove it from the database - so this URL no longer has any redirects pointing to it. My question is, surely this is bad for SEO? However I'm a little unsure as they aren't actually going through the redirect. But somewhere in cyber space the authority of this page must drop? Any advice is welcome 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Redirected Old Pages Still Indexed
Hello, we migrated a domain onto a new Wordpress site over a year ago. We redirected (with plugin: simple 301 redirects) all the old urls (.asp) to the corresponding new wordpress urls (non-.asp). The old pages are still indexed by Google, even though when you click on them you are redirected to the new page. Can someone tell me reasons they would still be indexed? Do you think it is hurting my rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0 -
Redirecting non www site
Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. I 100% agree with the redirecting of the non www domain name. After all we see so many times, especially in MOZ how the two different domains contain different links, different DA and of course different PA. So I have posed the question to our IT company, "How would we go about redirecting our non www domain to the www version?", "Where would we do that?", " we cant do the redirect on our webserver because the website is listed as an IP address, not a domain name, so would we do the redirect somewhere at GoDaddy?" who is currently maintain our DNS record So here is the response from IT: " I would setup a CNAME record in DNS (GoDaddy), such that no matter if you go to the bare domain, or the www, you end up in the same place. As for SEO, having a 301 redirect for your bare domain isn't necessary, because both the bare domain and the www are the same domain. 301 is a redirect for "permanently moved" and is common when you change domain names. Using the bare domain or the www are NOT DIFFERENT DOMAINS, so the 301 would not be accurate, and you'd be telling engines you've moved, when you haven't - which may negatively impact your rank. It sounds to me that IT is NOT recommending the redirect. How can this be? Or are we talking about two different things? Will the redirect cause the melt down as the IT company suggests? Or do they nut understand SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davenport-Tractor0 -
Redirecting, then redirecting back
Hey, mozzers! My first question ever... I have a client who has (fictitionally) WickerPatioHomeStore.com, which features wicker home decor. Not too long ago, they wanted a shorter, easier URL, so they redirected to another domain they own, WickerPatio.com (again, fictional). They saw somewhat of a drop in traffic, and wonder if there's a correlation with the words "home store" not being in their domain any more. When considering the two, I figure that relevant factors would be age of domains, history of content of the domains, and inbound links to each domain. Any thoughts on other things to consider? Thanks very much!! ~ Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GRIP-SEO0 -
After the 301 redirect
Hi all, A quick question, after you have setup your 301 re-directs in .htaccess - is it necessary to keep your content in the original domains directory? My thinking is that requests do get as far as referencing the directory, thus it should be safe to delete all the files on the old domain? Thanx!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazza7770 -
I need help with htaccess redirect
Hi guys, we have the domain cheats.co.uk, it has always displayed as cheats.co.uk without the www. However it is now showing 2 version of the site, both the www. and the non www. version. I know how to add to the htaccess folder to get the non www. version going to the www. version but i am worried about doing this because the non www. version has always been the one indexed in Google and has a page rank of 3. Should i in fact be redirecting the www.version to the non www. version to keep page rank etc? or will page rank be passed over etc if i redirect to the www. version I hope thats clear Thanks guys Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imrubbish0 -
Global Redirection Rules
SEO Moz Community: After twice changing directory software, I have a ton of 404 errors in Webmaster Tools (over 3,000). I've decided to do 301 redirects but can't manually enter in each 404 URL. How can you redirect pages from the same folder on a mass scale? For example, mysite.com/autos has hundreds of pages associated with it (/autos/ford, toyota etc.) How can you do a 301 that redirects all those pages without manually entering in each URL? Site is built on Wordpress
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0
