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.
How do you fix redirect chains and temporary redirects?
-
Hi,
I have a lot of issues popping up with temporary redirects and redirect chains. I'm still confused as to what exactly redirect chains are and I don't know how to find where the "chains" are or how to fix them. I'm having two issues mainly:1. Temporary RedirectsI have around 100 pages on our www.twowayradiosfor.com website that are being flagged as temporary redirects. All of them have one thing in common: they are review pages (basically, when a customer clicks on the Review button to review a certain product, they are redirected to a review page for that product).URL Example: https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/reviewhelpful.asp?ProductCode=CLS1410-COMBO&ID=44&yes=noI went into our website and set any URL containing the following as noindex:/review.aspWill that fix the issue? If yes, will I also need to do that for any URL containing /reviewhelpful.asp?2. Redirect ChainsIt seems like basically every product page on my website has this issue (over 100 pages). Here's an example of one:https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/Motorola-CLS1110-p/cls1110.htmI don't see any broken links on this page or links that redirect to another page that redirects, etc. What is causing this? Is it something on my header bar that is redirecting (since that header bar appears on every page, maybe that is why this issue shows up on a lot of pages)?I am new to Moz and still trying to figure this stuff out. I really appreciate any help.
Thanks,
Sawyer
-
Thank you again, Alex. Moz has tagged a bunch of these pages as "temporary redirects" so I have them all as "disallow" right now. I'm hoping that will fix the issue. I'm not sure why Moz is flagging them as temporary redirects. They are just review pages of my products, which I guess are generated when a customer clicks the Leave a Review button and then gets taken to these review pages.
-
I might not have understood your question, so apologies in advance if that's the case.
Your redirects won't be temporary, they'll be permanent (301). As far as the search engines (and anyone else) are concerned, the location has moved permanently.
You can't really set a redirect (temporary or permanent) as nofollow. The redirect is a response code from the server, it's not a link. To be fair, you wouldn't want to set it to nofollow even if you could, you want the search engines to follow the redirection to the new place and index that.
-
Hi Alex,
One more question for you. This is my understanding of the noindex, nofollow, etc. tags:
A ‘noindex’ tag tells search engines not to include the page in search results.Disallowing a page means you’re telling search engines not to crawl it.Nofollow: tells them not to follow the links on your page.So the best bet for these temporary redirects is to make them nofollow instead of just disallowing them?
Thanks,
Sawyer -
Alex, thank you for taking the time to write such a thorough and helpful response. I really appreciate it.
I will talk with my host, Volusion, about changing the noindex to nofollow.
It makes sense that I have issues with links being HTTP. I migrated my website over to Volusion from a really old platform and the website was originally created back in 2008, so I'm guessing we never fully migrated it over properly. I'm going to see if there's a way to find all of those http links and change them to https at one time, like you suggested.
Hopefully Volusion can help me properly configure the website, which should fix the Homepage and the AddThis feature and then I can use a tool to fix all of the other links.
Again, I really appreciate your help. Have a great day!
Sawyer
-
Great answer Alex!
I'm not too familiar with ASP and the CMS which powers your website but if it is a case of hardcoded reference, it's definitely worth asking a developer if they can run "a bulk find and replace."
As Alex says, using relative links is preferred these days but a quick but if your developer doesn't feel up to it or doesn't want to dabble in too much regex, what I said should be a quick and dirty solution.
Good luck!
Nick
-
1. Ideally, you want to set those "Review" links to nofollow, rather than the pages they link to noindex.
2. From a quick look, the problem seems to be that lots of your links are pointing to http, rather than https, which means the link gets followed and then your site redirects the client to the https version.
For example, in your breadcrumbs, you link to the homepage but at http. I would suggest using relative links to avoid this i.e "/"
Also, I assume your product descriptions were written before you moved to https, so any links in those are http too. (https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/Motorola-RMU2080D-p/rmu2080d.htm has a link at the bottom about a discontinued product that links to a http page). I would suggest using a find and replace tool to find any reference to http://www.twowayradiosfor.com/ and replace it with https://www.twowayradiosfor.comAlso, unlikely to be causing any issues, but the AddThis tool links are HTTP too, they don't get followed when you actually click them, but that would suggest to me that your site settings are still configured to HTTP rather than https. Perhaps Site Address (URL) is wrongly configured? (That would also explain the Home breadcrumb being wrong)
As an aside, I'd seriously consider dropping the www. given the already long url. It will make your SERPs a little better in my opinion.
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
-
Should we set up redirects for all deleted TAGS?
We recently found our site had 65,000 tags (yes 65K). In an effort to consolidate these we've started deleting them. MOZ is now reporting a heap of 404 errors for tag pages. These tag pages should not have links to them so not sure how come they're being crawled. Any suggestions from experience in this area would be useful.
Technical SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
301 Redirect for multiple links
I just relaunched my website and changed a permalink structure for several pages where only a subdirectory name changed. What 301 Redirect code do I use to redirect the following? I have dozens of these where I need to change just the directory name from "urban-living" to "urban", and want it to catch the following all in one redirect command. Here is an example of the structure that needs to change. Old
Technical SEO | | shawnbeaird
domain.com/urban-living (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe/the-vale (single page w/ content) New
domain.com/urban
domain.com/urban/tempe
domain.com/urban/tempe/the-vale0 -
Why does my Google Web Cache Redirects to My Homepage?
Why does my Google Webcache appears in a short period of time and then automatically redirects to my homepage? Is there something wrong with my robots.txt? The only files that I have blocked is below: User-agent: * Disallow: /bin/ Disallow: /common/ Disallow: /css/ Disallow: /download/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /medias/ Disallow: /ClientInfo.aspx Disallow: /*affiliateId* Disallow: /*referral*
Technical SEO | | Francis.Magos0 -
How to fix broken links?
Hi, I use WordPress CMS with Yoast SEO plugin. I have just found out that my 403 errors increased dramatically. It seems that all my tags below of each post are being broken for some reason. When i click on the tags i get the following massage: **403 Forbidden Request forbidden by administrative rules. ** I assume it has something to do with the configuration within Yoast SEO plugin. Dose anyone know how should i fix that? Thanks, Raviv evsGujA
Technical SEO | | Indiatravelz0 -
Mobile URL parameter (Redirection to desktop)
Hello, We have a parallel mobile website and recently we implemented a link pointing to the desktop website. This redirect is happening via a javascript code and results in a url followed by this paramenter: ?m=off Example:
Technical SEO | | echo1
http://www.m.website.com redirects to:
http://www.website.com/?m=off Questions: Will the "http://www.website.com/?m=off" be considered duplicate content with "http://www.website.com" since they both return the same content? Is there any possibility that Google will take into consideration the url ending in "/?m=off"? How should we treat this new url? The webmaster tools URL parameter configuration at the moment isn't experiencing problems but should we submit the parameter anyway in order not to be indexed or should we wait first and see the error response? In case we should submit this for removal... what's the best way to do it? Like this? Parameter: ?m=off Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? - doesn't affect page content Any help is much appreciated.
Thank you!0 -
301 redirect from Blogger
Hello, I have a client with a Wordpress network of blogs, each blog is owned by a different blogger. Many of them were migrated time ago from Blogger. I have seen that the way used to redirect them is a meta refresh, so no authority is being passed. I cannot find any reliable way of making a 301 from Blogger, There are some plugins, but I'm afraid of using them. Any of you have experience with this situation please? I have even thought about placing a global rel canonical before the meta refresh, but I think that here the problem is the meta refresh itself.... Thank you in advance
Technical SEO | | Juandbbam0 -
Htaccess redirect with question mark
Hi I have a problem setting up my htaccess for a specific page that has a question mark in the link, and one that has a space in the link and also a question mark. So I would like 2 redirects in my htaccess like that: www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=pagename1 to www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=page name2 to www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html I have tried with something like this but doesn't work: RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^page.php?page=pagename1 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html" [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^page.php?page=page name2 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html" [R=301,L] Could someone tell me what exactly I have to change? Thanks
Technical SEO | | darkanweb0 -
301 Redirect & Cloaking
HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
Technical SEO | | Artience0