Redirection plugin: wordpress vs apache module?
-
Hi,
Any one familiar with the wordpress plugin 'redirection'
Are there any SEO benefits of having the plugin write the 301 redirects into the .htaccess?
The standard mode does not use .htaccess but has wordpress genertae the 301s
Thanks
-
Thanks William, nice to hear advice from some one who has been using the plugin.
I'll go ahead and use the apache module to keep the server usage low.
-
Thank for the advice Paul, I'll go ahead and write into the .htaccess as your recommend.
-
Everything Paul says is true and with regards to the SEO perspective faster is better. Speed is a ranking factor which Google looks at.
I've actually used "Redirection" on a few of my sites before and the speed difference between redirects using WordPress redirect VS Apache redirect is marginal but the resource usage difference is vast. It requires very little server resources to read the .htaccess file and redirect compared to running through the core of WordPress to generate the 301 then send it.
Point the plugin to the .htaccess file and use the Apache module instead and you'll get both the benefit of slightly improved redirect times with the added benefit of using less server resources to do it.
-
Like paul mentioned, htaccess redirects are faster compared to a wordpress plugin.
but if you a huge number of redirection required on pages/posts then go for the plugin.
-
The big benefit to having the redirects written into htaccess is that htaccess will run them much more quickly (and with lower server overhead) than from inside WordPress. If you only have a few redirects at a time to correct for moved pages or creating short URLs for marketing campaigns, doing it within the Redirection plugin is fine.
But if you're writing a large number of redirects (to handle a site move for example) you're far better off writing them into htaccess.
Paul
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 vs 302
Hello everyone! I'm working with a site right now that is currently formatted as subdomain.domain.net. The old version of the site was formatted as domain.net, with domain.com and several other variants redirecting to the current format, subdomain.domain.net. All of these redirects are 302, and I'm wondering if I should have all these changed to 301. Many of our old backlinks go to the old format of domain.net and i know the juice isn't being passed through, but i was wondering if there is any reason why you may want a 302 over a 301 in this case? Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KathleenDC0 -
404 to 301 redirects is there a limit?
Hi We've just updated our website and have binned out alot of old thin content which has no value even if re written. We have a lot of 404 error on WMT and I am in the process of doing 301 redirects on them. Is there a limit to the number of 301 the site should have?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
260k 301 redirects
Hello, I just found that some of the urls on my site have both ugly characters and some other things I'd like to fix (such as ---- into a single - ) After some local tests i've seen that If i leave some imperfections there will be 48k different urls on the other hand if the renaming procedure is strict i'll have around 260k out of 2.3M urls to be renamed. If I'm going to do this I'll create new canonicals meta tag and redirect old urls with 301 headers to the new location. The content will not change. My big doubt is SEO wise, I know that I'll have better urls, but aren't those too much redirects on a single day? what would you do if you wish to have shipshape urls and know some of these are crap? thanks
Technical SEO | | mylittlepwny0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
When is it safe to remove 301 redirects?
I have created over 500 301 redirects in my .htaccess file, some of them are more than 2 years old now. Should I delete them? I don't like seeing the "notices" number in crawl diagnostics so high 😞
Technical SEO | | danielshaw0 -
301 Redirect
The SEOmoz crawl campaign found some 404 errors in my Joomla site poker-brands.ca. So, I figured I would set up 301 redirects in my hosting account to make sure bots don't read that there is a page missing. For example: This link gave a 404 error in the crawl: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager I redirected it to: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pt3-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager-hem-hm2 However, when I visit the first link it doesn't send me to the second link. Am I supposed to get forwarded to the second link now?
Technical SEO | | Uramark0 -
Redirects
If I redirect page A to page B does page A need to exist before Google sees the redirect. Or can I just put up a redirect and delete page A. If the page doesn't need to exist: You have all your redirects in place for a website. You want this website to redirect to another website. You completely delete the website and put up the htaccess, there should be no problem with this, because the redirects are in place correct? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Redirecting a domain
I was setting up a new campaign and received the following error from Roger Robot. "We have detected that the domain www.sitename.com and the domain sitename.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here." I know about redirecting a PAGE using 301 Redirects and how to specify the www. canonical in Google webmaster tools, but is there a "DOMAIN" redirect that I'm missing. What would you suggest doing given the error message above. Thanks, Bill Sqnch.jpg
Technical SEO | | Marvo0