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 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.
-
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
-
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)!
-
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
-
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.
-
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)
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
-
Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?
Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaiaslastlaugh0 -
Is domain authority lost if you create a 301 redirect but mark it as noindex, nofollow?
Hi everyone, Our company sells products in various divisions. While we've been selling Product A and Product B under our original brand, we've recently created a new division with a new domain to focus on a Product B. The new domain has virtually no domain authority (3) while the original domain has some (37). We want customers to arrive on the new domain when they search for key search terms related to Product B instead of the pages that previously existed on our main website. If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags? I read a few blog posts from Moz that said there isn't any domain authority lost with 301 redirects but I'm not sure if that is true if the pages are noindex, nonofollow. Do you follow? 🙂 Apologies for the lengthy post. Love this community and the great Moz team. Thanks, Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jgoehring-troy0 -
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
How to handle potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following a major site replacement
We are looking for the very best way of handling potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeezerG
a major site replacement and I mean total replacement. Things you should know
Existing domain has 17 years history with Google but rankings have suffered over the past year and yes we know why. (and the bitch is we paid a good sized SEO company for that ineffective and destructive work)
The URL structure of the new site is completely different and SEO friendly URL's rule. This means that there will be many thousands of historical URL's (mainly dynamic ones) that will attract 404 errors as they will not exist anymore. Most are product profile pages and the God Google has indexed them all. There are also many links to them out there.
The new site is fully SEO optimised and is passing all tests so far - however there is a way to go yet. So here are my thoughts on the possible ways of meeting our need,
1: Create 301 redirects for each an every page in the .htaccess file that would be one huge .htaccess file 50,000 lines plus - I am worried about effect on site speed.
2: Create 301 redirects for each and every unused folder, and wildcard the file names, this would be a single redirect for each file in each folder to a single redirect page
so the 404 issue is overcome but the user doesn't open the precise page they are after.
3: Write some code to create a hard copy 301 index.php file for each and every folder that is to be replaced.
4: Write code to create a hard copy 301 .php file for each and every page that is to be replaced.
5: We could just let the pages all die and list them with Google to advise of their death.
6: We could have the redirect managed by a database rather than .htaccess or single redirect files. Probably the most challenging thing will be to load the data in the first place, but I assume this could be done programatically - especially if the new URL can be inferred from the old. Many be I am missing another, simpler approach - please discuss0 -
Multilingual Site and 301 redirection
Hey there awesome people of Moz I have this site that has many languages in it. The main language is English and my developer did the following www.example.com ( is the main site ) which redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en if your geo location is supported by our languages then you will automatically be redirected to whatever language you have in your country but does the first language with is english have to 301 redirect to www.example.com/en ? I thought that the right way is to just leave /en at the root file. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
For URLs that require login, should our redirect be 301 or 302?
We have a login required section of our website that is being crawled and reporting as potential issues in Webmaster Tools. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is - is it to make URLs requiring a login noindex/nocrawl? Right now, we have them 302 redirecting to the login page, since it's a temporary redirect, it seems like it isn't the right solution. Is a 301 better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alecfwilson0 -
Redirect at Registrar or Server
Hi folks, I have run into a situation were a new client has 3 TLDs (e.g. mycompany.com, mycompany.org and mycompany.biz), all with the same content. They are on a Windows IIS environment, which I am not familiar with. Until now, all of my clients have been Linux/Apache environment, so I always dealt with these issues utilizing htaccess. Currently all resolve to the same IP, but the URL remains the same in the browser address field (e.g. if you type-in mycompany.org - it remains as such). We want the .org and .biz version to 301 Redirect to the .com TLD. I am wondering what the best practice might be in this situation? Could we simply redirect at the registrar level or would implementation at the server level be best? If so, I would really appreciate an example from someone with experience implementing redirects on IIS. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Can I make 301 redirects on a Windows server (without access to IIS)?
Hey everyone, I've been trying to figure out a way to set up some 301 redirects to handle the broken links left behind after a site restructuring, but I can only ever find information on 2 methods that I can't use (as far as I can tell). The first method is to do some stuff with an htaccess file, but that looks like it only works on Linux-based servers. The method described for Windows servers is generally to install this IIS rewrite/redirect module and run that, but I don't think our web hosting company allows users to log directly into the server, so I wouldn't be able to use the IIS thing. Is there any other way to get a 301 redirect set up? And is this uncommon for a web hosting company to do, or do you all just run your sites on Linux-based servers or your own Windows machines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrianAlpert780