302 > 302 > 301 Redirect Chain Issue & Advice

[Andrew_In_Search_of_Answers]

Hi everyone,

I recently relaunched our website and everything went well. However, while checking site health, I found a new redirect chain issue (302 > 302 > 301 > 200) when the user requests the HTTP and non-www version of our URL. Here's what's happening:

• 302 #1 -- http://domain.com/example/ 302 redirects to http://domain.com/PnVKV/example/ (the 5 characters in the appended "subfolder" are dynamic and change each time)
• 302 #2 -- http://domain.com/PnVKV/example/ 302 redirects BACK to http://domain.com/example/
• 301 #1 -- http://domain.com/example/ 301 redirects to https://www.domain.com/example/ (as it should have done originally)
• 200 -- https://www.domain.com/example/ resolves properly

We're hosted on AWS, and one of my cloud architects investigated and reported GoDaddy was causing the two 302s. That's backed up online by posts like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46307518/random-5-alpha-character-path-appended-to-requests and https://www.godaddy.com/community/Managing-Domains/My-domain-name-not-resolving-correctly-6-random-characters-are/td-p/60782.

I reached out to GoDaddy today, expecting them to say it wasn't a problem on their end, but they actually confirmed this was a known bug (as of September 2017) but there is no timeline for a fix. I asked the first rep I spoke with on the phone to send a summary, and here's what he provided in his own words:

From the information gathered on my end and I was able to get from our advanced tech support team, the redirect issue is in a bug report and many examples have been logged with the help of customers, but no log will be made in this case due to the destination URL being met. Most issues being logged are site not resolving properly or resolving errors. I realize the redirect can cause SEO issues with the additional redirects occurring. Also no ETA has been logged for the issue being reported. I do feel for you since I now understand more the SEO issues it can cause. I myself will keep an eye out for the bug report and see if any progress is being made any info outside of this I will email you directly. Thanks.

Issue being Experienced:

Domains that are set to Go Daddy forwarding IPs may sometimes resolve to a url that has extra characters appended to the end of them. Example: domain1.com forwards to http://www.domain2.com/TLYEZ. However it should just forward to http://www.domain2.com.

I think this answers what some Moz users may have been experiencing sporadically, especially this previous thread: https://moz.com/community/q/forwarded-vanity-domains-suddenly-resolving-to-404-with-appended-url-s-ending-in-random-5-characters.

My question: Given everything stated above and what we know about the impact of redirect chains on SEO, how severe should I rate this? I told my Director that I would recommend we move away from GoDaddy (something I don't want to do, but feel we _**have **_to do), but she viewed it as just another technical SEO issue and one that didn't necessarily need to be prioritized over others related to the relaunch.

How would you respond in my shoes? On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the biggest), how big of a technical SEO is this? Would you make it a priority?

At the very least, I thought the Moz community would benefit from the GoDaddy confirmation of this issue and knowing about the lack of an ETA on a fix.

Thanks!

[Everett]

Thank you for sharing the GoDaddy response with the Moz community Andrew.

How many (and which) pages/links is this affecting? Once I know that I should be able to help a little more with prioritization. If this is the way your navigation menu works, for example, then it's a 10. If it's just happening on one page that doesn't have a lot of external backlinks it's a 1.

Google says they follow redirects at least five levels deep and that they treat 302s and 301s the same. In my humble opinion after seeing numerous examples otherwise, this is B.S. It can depend on the response times, how the redirects are implemented, how much trust Google has in your site, and many other things. Long story short, fix it if you can, but I doubt it's going to require switching hosts.

[GastonRiera]

Hi Andrew,

First of all, its not possible to rate the priority of this issue without knowing all the other technical problems in that website.
is it a big issue in terms of SEO? yes it definitely is.
Your main concern should be in how long google considers that 302 as permanent.

On the other hand, Google publicly said that they do fully understand up to 5 hops in redirects.

Given these facts, i've try to measue all the issues to be solved and the time, money and energy available to solve them all. Start with those that carry the most potential gain (UX+SEO+Sales+whatever you consider).

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.