Should you cache redirects?
-
I would like to know what fellow SEO people think, should you cache a redirect?
Problems I see with caching redirects are meta refreshes and there might be a slow down in page load, but is it a big issue? Should we cache redirects?
Do pages get indexed more if you cache redirects? Our ecommerce product pages are all dynamic, and currently we cache redirects but i'm seeing a lot of meta refresh issues.
Another area that cropped up is that, the redirect doesn't pass on query parameters. Our system dumps URLs and they are redirected to SEO ones, but the redirect doesn't pass on parameters like Google Analytic tracking tags.
What are your thoughts?
Thanks
-
Sorry for the late response, but I can sum up my answer in a brief way.
I agree with you. If SEOmoz is finding the meta refresh, it's likely Google is too. And why the meta refresh? Why not a 301 redirect?
Could you provide an example of one of your search pages? Feel free to private message me if you don't want to share publicly.
-
Hi Cyrus,
Here's some more information. Hopefully it will help. All of our product pages are generated using a program. Users enter data into specific fields and gets saved.
Once the publish button is pushed of the program, the data goes to our developers. This isn't live on the web yet as it is just data. The information is dumped into a folder and our developers generate SEO urls and start populating templates with data.
This is what gets published live and indexed.
If I wanted to change the SEO URL. I simply need to specify which fields to generate the new URL from and get the existing URL to redirect to the new one. I can secure a single jump this way and crawlers will never jump from one link to another.
Google just sees this SEO URL and template page.
The problem is that, for efficiency purposes, the website's internal search doesn't use the SEO url, it instead generates a url based on the folder that gets data dumped in. Once a user clicks on this URL, they get redirected to the SEO page. Developers did this for "efficiency reasons"
This is where meta refresh is kicking in. Anyone who clicks on a product from a search gets redirects to the SEO one. SEOMoz is reporting a high meta refresh issue, but my developers are saying it's no problem as the search pages never get indexed.
In my opinion, even though the page isn't getting indexed, the spider is still following and noticing the meta refresh.
After pursuing, they said they can turn off from caching redirects. I'm not well versed in the implications of turning off the caching of redirects. Thus my curious question
-
Hi Cyto,
I'm no expert here, (and I might ask a few other SEO types with more expertise to jump in) but I'm curious - What do search engines see with these redirects?
For example, if I try to access page /example.html?q=1&tw=89, what does Google see in terms of redirects, response codes and URLs.
Also, could you provide a little more background on the meta refresh issue? Do the redirects pass through a meta refresh, and again what is the crawl path for search engines?
Thanks for your patience!
Cyrus
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
-
Why is this url redirecting to our site?
I was doing an audit on our site and searching for duplicate content using some different terms from each of our pages. I came across the following result: www.sswug.org/url/32639 redirects to our website. Is that normal? There are hundreds of these url's in google all with the exact same description. I thought it was odd. Any ideas and what is the consequence of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
301 redirections done too late - What do you suggest?
Hi, When pushing our new site live, most of the 301 redirections got done too late for several reasons. Understandably, our site rankings in google have taken a hit now. So far we have just tried to perfectly optimize the pages that used to rank well (They weren't even optimized before and were still ranking) , to get our positions back. But does anyone have an idea about what else we could do? Is there a recommended "action plan" when someone is late with their 301 redirections?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohanMattisson0 -
301 Redirect Dilemma - Website redesign
Hi Guys, We are redesigning a clients ecommerce site. As part of the process, we're changing the URL structure to make it more friendly. I have put together a provisional 301 redirect plan but I'm not sure just how far I need to go with it. So far I have extract all the pages from the existing site that Google Webmaster Tools says have links pointing at them - this totals 93 pages. I have matched each page like for like to the new website structure. My next step was to pull the landing pages report from Google Analytics, I have extracted the pages that received entrances over the last 6 weeks. This totals 553, less the redirects I have already done and cleaning up some Google Translate pages I have circa 410 pages left. Many of these pages has more than 1 URL pointing to that page. I'm debating how important it is that that all of these remaining 410 pages have individual redirects set up for them one by one. I have to rule out regex because there is no pattern that makes sense given that I have already set up redirects for the first 93 pages that have external links. My question therefore is how important are 301 redirects on pages that have no external links and receive less than 10 entrances over a 6 week previous period? Do I need to 301 every single product on the old site to it's corresponding page on the new site? Also, I'm not sure how to treat pages that have mutliple URL's on the old site, the existing URL structure is such a mess that in some instances I have 5 URL's for one product page? I could feasibly create 5 seperate redirects but is this necessary? Also what about speed considerations, the server is going to have to load these redirects and it may slow the site down. I'm sitting at 100 odd so far. Any answers are most appreciated. Thanks Derek.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseo0 -
Is there anything wrong with this 301 redirect?
I'll keep this one short and sweet 🙂 Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL. The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results. This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages. I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
301 redirect
Hi there, I have some good links pointing to one of my web pages at the moment, however we are just about to launch a new design with new URL structure and I am clear that I need to do a 301 redirect on the URL to the new URL. However, do I keep the old URL live forever? or can I remove it after a while? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Login redirect 302
Ok - anyone knows what to do with the temporary redirect to the login page? In our e-commerce system we have a checkout page, which requires user to be logged in - if they are not, we redirect them to the login page using simple php header("Locaiton: url"). This however has been found as a Warning as it's a temporary redirect. I can't really put there permanent redirect for obvious reasons so if someone could give me some clue on this situation that would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coremediadesign0 -
Is it safe to redirect multiple URLs to a single URL?
Hi, I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates. The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date. The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links. Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain. My intention is to: Shut down the old site Focus all attention on building up content on the new website Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...) Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage Sounds good, right? But there is one issue I need some advice on... The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site. I call these my "black sheep pages". So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death? OPTION A: oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndreVanKets
oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION B: oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION 😄 oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com -> newsite.com My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique. What would you do? Help 😐1 -
Reducing pages with canonical & redirects
We have a site that has a ridiculous number of pages. Its a directory of service providers that is organized by city and sub-category of the vertical. Each provider is on the main city page, then when you click on a category, it will only show those folks who offer that subcategory of this service. example: colorado/denver - main city page colorado/denver/subcat1 - subcategory page There are 37 subcategories. So, 38 pages that essentially have the same content - minus a provider or two - for each city. There are approx 40K locations in our database. So rough math puts us at 1.5 million results pages, with 97% of those pages being duplicate content! This is clearly a problem. But many of these obscure pages do rank and get traffic. A fair amount when you aggregate all these pages together. We are about to go through a redesign and want to consolidate pages so we can reduce the dupe content, get crawl budget allocated to more meaningful pages, etc. Here's what I'm thinking we should do with this site, and I would love to have your input: Canonicalize Before the redesign use the canonical tag on all the sub-category pages and push all the value from those pages (colorado/denver/subcat1, /subcat2, /subcat3... etc) to the main city page (colorado/denver/subcat1) 301 Redirect On the new site (we're moving to a new CMS) we don't publish the duplicate sub-category pages and do 301 redirects from the sub-category URLs to the main city page urls. We'd still have the sub-categories (keywords) on-page and use some Javascript filtering to narrow results. We could cut to the chase and just do the redirects, but would like to use canonicalization as a proof of concept internally at my company that getting rid of these pages is a good thing, or at least wont have a negative impact on traffic. i.e. by the time we are ready to relaunch traffic and value has been transfered to the /state/city page Trying to create the right plan and build my argument. Any feedback you have will help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trentc0