Holy Redirects
-
Currently working on a project for a medium sized site (http://sleeponcall.com/) but the SEOMoz crawl crawled over 14,000 pages because the report is showing more than 8,000 redirects.
The client has no clue how this happened as their previous web programmers may not have been on the ball.
What could be causing the problem and what is the best way to untangle this mess?
-
Carl
If you check through Everett Sizemore's pro webinar about E-comerce SEO, he covers the correct way to set up of Megneto for ecommerce, from memory he also offers some additional resources you can check out. i think its around 45 mins in.
http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues
Hope that helps
-
Did you have a look at the file I made for you? Hope so, took me 20 minutes to compile and all
As William said, look for 301 or 302 mentioned in the .htaccess file, if those are mentioned there, that's a sign that things are being redirected.
A rebuild is always useful, but of course, the budget probably isn't there and I can respect that.
Let us know about the .htaccess file..
-
If you have the resources I suggest rebuilding it under Magento again. Might be well worth the time if you have a lot of problems with the previous design.
-
I agree the way the entire site is setup is strange. Still trying to get answers from the original site builders as to what they did and why.
-
Look for the numbers 301,302 redirects.
i.e. [r=301,nc] and something along those lines. Look for the culprit that way and remove it.
I thought Magento was up to date on these problems, are you running the latest? I find it odd that everything is within the sub /index.php/'category'.
-
Thanks for the help, the site is in fact run on Magento.
I'll have the programmer check the redirect code in the .htacess file, is there anything specific I should be looking for in the Magento setup?
-
Hi Carl,
I immediately fired up Xenu and did a test, there's an option to set redirects as errors, to locate the redirects. Here's is the downloadable export: http://www.imoddigital.com/sleeponcall/sleeponcall.xlsx
When you look at the file in Excel, the redirect pages won't appear as 200, they'll either be 301 or 302, this will allow you to isolate the troublesome pages.
Please do check your .htaccess file like Justin has suggested, that would have been my very first point of call.
Hope that helps!
Christopher
-
Its sounds like pages are on a redirect loop....
Run a scrawl using link sleuth and identify the URL's that are redirecting and you can take it from there.
Perhaps do the scan, and then report back with an example of why they are redirecting and we can be of better assistance.
Greg
-
My guess would be that at some point the url structure of the site has been changed and have 301'd from the old url structure to the new one.
Have you checked the .htaccess file on the server to see if there are any redirect code in there?
Another possibility is the platform could be causing it. What platform is the site created in? If it is an off the shelf e-com system then configs can cause these kind of issues, I believe magento is a culprit of this if its not set up correctly.
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
-
301 Redirects Relating to Your XML Sitemap
Lets say you've got a website and it had quite a few pages that for lack of a better term were like an infomercial, 6-8 pages of slightly different topics all essentially saying the same thing. You could all but call it spam. www.site.com/page-1 www.site.com/page-2 www.site.com/page-3 www.site.com/page-4 www.site.com/page-5 www.site.com/page-6 Now you decided to consolidate all of that information into one well written page, and while the previous pages may have been a bit spammy they did indeed have SOME juice to pass through. Your new page is: www.site.com/not-spammy-page You then 301 redirect the previous 'spammy' pages to the new page. Now the question, do I immediately re-submit an updated xml sitemap to Google, which would NOT contain all of the old URL's, thus making me assume Google would miss the 301 redirect/seo juice. Or do I wait a week or two, allow Google to re-crawl the site and see the existing 301's and once they've taken notice of the changes submit an updated sitemap? Probably a stupid question I understand, but I want to ensure I'm following the best practices given the situation, thanks guys and girls!
Technical SEO | | Emory_Peterson0 -
301 redirect relative or absolute path?
Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
Technical SEO | | Silviu
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
S.0 -
Magento Redirect Loop
On my clients site I changed the URL structure for products. First they had a trailing slash: http://www.wellamy.com/market/food/oklahoma-relief-effort/healthy-snacks/caramel-apple-chewy-snack-bars/ I changed it to end in .html http://www.wellamy.com/market/food/oklahoma-relief-effort/healthy-snacks/caramel-apple-chewy-snack-bars.html Now rather than redirecting properly, it causes a redirect loop. Any idea how I can fix this?
Technical SEO | | Imajery0 -
Delete 301 redirected pages from server after redirect is in place?
Should I remove the redirected old pages from my site after the redirects are in place? Google is hating the redirects and we have tanked. I did over 50 redirects this week, consolidating content and making one great page our of 3-10 pages with very little content per page. But the old pages are still visible to google's bot. Also, I have not put a rel canonical to itself on the new pages. Is that necessary? Thanks! Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
Redirecting Parked Domain
I just recently switched hosting. We have 3 domains and 1 being the main domain. Right now they are set up as parked domains. Can I redirect the parked domains under my main websites .htaccess file ? I am just worried that good we will get hit for duplicate content, even though technically the content is only on our main domain. right now if I type in my parked domains in Google, they appear in search. The site is all hand coded and not using a CMS.
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Is my 301 redirect working?
Very simple question here . I've redirected a bunch of older pages with decent ranking to some newer pages on my site, using the Thesis theme's built-in redirect function. However, in the SERPS, the older pages (and, importantly, older titles) still show up. When clicked on, they redirect to the new page, but it's still irritating because the older titles make the site look out of date. Is this Working As Intended, or have I or my theme done something wrong? And if it's the latter, what's the best way to achieve a redirect, preferably with a Wordpress plugin?
Technical SEO | | Cairmen0 -
301 Redirects Change?
Hi, Mozzers- I've noticed pages that are getting 301 redirected are staying out there longer. It used to be that you would implement a 301 redirect and then after a couple of months the old page would disappear out of Google's index. Over the last couple of months I've noticed pages lingering, popping up.... What gives? Thanks in advance! LHC
Technical SEO | | lhc670 -
IIS Work Around 301 Redirects
We are redirecting page-level content (about 500 pages) from several sub domains to our main site. With IIS, It’s my understanding that file locations must match. For example: subdomain/pathA/filename1
Technical SEO | | DigitalMkt
mainsite/pathA/filename1 Since the sub domain files are not on the main site, this means we'd create up to 500 zero byte dummy files on the new server and replicate the sub domain directory structure. With IIS is there a work around for handling page level redirects without duplicating the file location? In the case of white papers, videos and case studies, we'll imlement directory level redirection. Thanks in advance.0