301 Redirect in breadcrumb. How bad is it?

[oceanstorm]

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.

[effectdigital]

That sounds like you could have a soft redirect issue of some kind. If the 'actual' redirects 'strip' the trailing slash, but the then non-trailing slash URLs canonical back to the trailing slash versions (which again redirect to remove the slash) then that's known as a soft redirect loop and yes it can adversely  affect SEO performance

So let's have a look, using this URL as an example:

https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/camping-tents-other-brands

Status Code (200 OK) - but canonical tag is like:

So when you visit that URL with the trailing slash... It does NOT 301 to remove the slash, so no you are not caught in a soft redirect loop and that is not the issue. However, be that as it may, having ALL the hyperlinks point to 'non-/' and then all the canonicals point to 'trailling-/', could be very confusing for Google. Does it go with the canonical URL, or the URL with the most links which is also a signal of, what page is legit?

I would still get it seen to

[oceanstorm]

Thanks for this useful info. I've done some more digging however, I may have just stumbled across what could be the issue in the slow paced decline month on month...?

So back when we started to gradually loose SEO ground we were actually changing URL structure from

fishingtackleshop.com.au/categories/fishing-tackle  to fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing-tackle    (we removed the /categories part of the URL  so link juice wasn't being passed onto that benign sub-directory "categories").

However, in a Screeming Frog Crawl today what i noticed but haven't picked up on before since i was only looking for 404 and 301 issues,  is it seems we are actually having canonical issues.

SO,

/fishing-tackle  is not indexed in google since it is canonicalised  to /fishing-tackle/ (trailing slash).. Why i don't know perhaps as developer has listed trailing slash link in the menu.

but /fishing-tackle/ is also not indexed when i just did a google search.

So, I am guessing i may have found my issue? (or a big part of it)!

canonical.png

[effectdigital]

Past performance is seldom a good indicator of future success. The web is so competitive now that 'good unique content' isn't really good enough any more (anyone can make it)

This video from Rand is a good illustration: https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday - where you say "content is original and not bad" - maybe that's not enough any more

One solution is the 10x content initiative: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday

And your site should have a unique value-proposition for end users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AmRg3p79pM (just wait for Miley to stop outlining issue #1 then stop watching)

It's possible your tech issue is a contributing factor but I'd say search engine advancements and changing standards are likely to be affecting you more

Even if you do have a strong legacy, that's not a 'meal ticket' to rank well forever. SEO is a competitive environment

Sometimes tech issues (like people accidentally no-indexing their whole site or blocking GoogleBot) can be responsible for massive drops. But these days it's usually more a comment on what Google thinks is good / bad

[oceanstorm]

Thanks for your feedback

To confirm they were not an old parent category that we set as not visable.  It was purely  new category set to non-visable in bigcommerec for design purpose due limitations.

I'll explain.  here is one page

https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing-lures

You will note we have shop by category at the top..  but further below we have shop by species... for design purpose we had to create the parent category and set to not visable as "shop by species"  and put in a heap of Visable child categories under that. IE barra lures, bass lures etc.

However, the problem lied as in breadcrumbs even though we set category "shop by species" as not visible the link still showed in breadcrumbs. so we 301 redirected it back to the prior head parent category /fishing-lures  (effectively in the breadcrumb trail there was then 2 links to /fishing-lures

Long story short /fishing-lures-shop-by-species (the non visable catery) was a brand new category created for our design purpose of our live page https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing-lures  due to bigcommerce limitations.  It was never an active old page...

today i have removed the 301 and i will just create a landing page.  but over the past few days we have taken a further tank in our rankings and i cant understand why other than this theory.  content is original and not bad, established site since 2005, used to rank #1 for just about any keyword, previously targeted by negative SEO but Disavow file is updated once a month via SEMRUSH monitoring.

If you or anyone else have any further ideas for me to look at as for possible issues do share :).

Thanks again for taking the time to give your initial imput.

[effectdigital]

Highly doubt that would be a reason to 'lose of lot of SEO ground'. If those URLs were 404-ing before, you had breadcrumb links to 404s and that's worse than breadcrumb links to 301s

The bigger problem was, you lost your category pages which got set to not visible. And by the way, even when you change them back to 'visible', if the 301 is still in effect - users and search engines still won't be able to access your category URLs (as they will be redirected instead!)

If the category pages have been restored and you're still redirecting them, yes that is a big problem. But it's not because you used a 301 in a link, it's because you took away your category URLs. That very well could impact performance (IMO)