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
-
Redirection Problem
I have a site that has 2,50,000 pages and I want to redirect to another domain. Is it good practice for SEO and google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari0 -
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 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
301 Redirects?
We have an e-commerce website with about 4500 products for sale. About 1200 of these items were not showing up in the Google PLA ads because they were $0 dollar items, so we made those products invisible. Then Set 301 Redirects for each of the 1200 items. My question is this; we want to turn back on the 1200 items, should we delete the 301 redirects that are in place for them.? Will it hurt SEO performance by having them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Goriilla0 -
Redirection strategy for mobile site
Hello folks! I am just about to launch a mobile specific version of our website. We were not able to make the main site responsive so have decided to make a seperate copy on an m dot subdomain. I have kept the url structure identical between both sites and added a canonical url on the mobile pages pointing to the desktop site. I will detect and redirect all mobile devices and googlebot mobile crawler to the m dot site. The questions i have are as follows... Is that the best approach if you use a mobile specific site on a seperate subdomain? What type of redirects should i use to send mobile users (and googlebot mobile) to the mobile site? My mobile site does not have all the pages the desktop site has. What happens if i redirect a mobile user from a page on the desktop site to a page on the mobile site that does not exist? (will give 404 currently). I guess i could maintain a list of valid mobile urls but this would be a pain (and a bit of an overhead) Your help is most appreciated Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertHill0 -
How to 301 redirect all URLs with /? in?
I want to redirect all URLs that have /? in it. Indexed in Google is a bunch of urls lik: mysite.com/?674764 mysite.com/?rtf8y78 I want all these URLs to be redirected to my home page. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
What happens with a 301 redirected page?
Hi All, What happens with an indexed page that I 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Is it removed from the Google index after a while? Thanks0 -
Problem w/ 301 Redirect
Here is how I did the configuration of the redirects: I don’t understand why the destination page is different from the one is configured in the apache server. Any ideas? For example: http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/entertainment/ is being already being 301 redirected to a 404 page (http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.htmlentertainment/) that does not exist on the Apache server. As you can see, the url was incorrectly written. Another occurrence from the spreadsheet is http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/beach.html, which is also being 301 redirected to a 404 page (http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.htmlgallery/beach.html). This is causing a hard 404 page. Here is my .httpaccess file: <virtualhost 192.168.200.25:80=""></virtualhost> ServerAdmin ecommerce@sol-group.com DocumentRoot /home/www/solgroup/americas/meliacaribetropical.com ServerName www.meliacaribetropical.com ServerAlias meliacaribetropical.com Redirect permanent /spanish/services/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/services.html Redirect permanent /entertainment/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/services.html Redirect permanent /press/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/restaurantes/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html Redirect permanent /spanish/entertainment/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html Redirect permanent /spanish/services/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html Redirect permanent /es/spa/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html Redirect permanent /spanish/accommodations/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/habitaciones.html Redirect permanent /spanish/spa/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html Redirect permanent /spanish/royal/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicio-real.html Redirect permanent /spanish/dining/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html Redirect permanent /spanish/flintstones/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/galeria/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/visor.html Redirect permanent /spanish/gallery/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/visor.html Redirect permanent /es/reuniones-eventos/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/grupos.html Redirect permanent /lowest-rate.php http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /es/los-picapiedra/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /gallery/beach.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /gallery/dining.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/gastronomy.html Redirect permanent /gallery/pools.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/sitemap.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/galeria/playa.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/galeria/restaurantes.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html Redirect permanent /es/galeria/piscinas.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/prensa/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/gallery/beach.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/gallery/pools.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/gallery/dining.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html Redirect permanent /spanish/press/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /en/groups.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/groups.html Redirect permanent /terms-condition.php http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /es/all_inclusive.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/terms-condition.php http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/prensa/family-facilities-amenities.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/outside-us-telephone-listing.php http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /es/prensa/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /press/family-facilities-amenities.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html Redirect permanent /es/prensa/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /spanish/press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html Redirect permanent /press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0