Redirecting a redirect - thoughts?
-
Hi! A client has just had 14k 404s pop up in his WMT. I think this is because a page that they redirected to had moved. My question is, can I clean these up by redirecting the page the original redirect was one? If so, will it have any negative impact?
-
It is usually better to redirect one to one instead of redirecting from a redirect. Where possible it should be avoided because eventually, if you chain too many redirects to redirects, Google will stop caring. There will be no negative impact from changing an old redirect to point at a more relevant page. You may want to double-check that the level of traffic and inbound links pointing to the page is worth going through the trouble of the 301 instead of letting it 404. Sometimes it can be better to just let a page die if no one is clicking through on it.
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
-
Ugly Redirect Chain
Hey everyone, Hoping to get your take on this: We have some very high demand products, they usually sell out in minutes (lucky us, eh?!) We are implementing a queue function on a product page - basically if too many people try to check out at the same time, we dump them in a queue The queue could kick in before or after search engines have indexed the product page The product page has markup and on-page content relating to the product. The queue page exists on an external (yes, external) site The queue page will not have any of the product info, markup, or optimised page title Product page will 302 to queue page and starts a series of 302 redirects! Here's the sequence when queue is active: CANONICAL product page (with markup, on-page product info, optimised page title, etc.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TSEOTEAM
>> 302 >> queue page on external domain (ZERO markup, product info or page title)
>>302>> same queue page, but throwing a hashed queue ID into the URL (basically giving you your place in the queue)
HELD IN QUEUE FOR A FEW MINUTES
**>> 302> ** NON-CANONICAL product page (with markup, on-page product info, optimised page title, etc.) I can foresee two scenarios search engine has indexed product page prior to queue kicking in. Then queue kicks in 302ing search engine to queue page. because it's a 302 the crappy queue page content is indexed back to the originating product page. This causes search engines to drop the product page cos all the product-specific markup/content has been overwritten with crappy queue page content search engines don't manage to index product page before queue kicks in. They crawl product page URL, get 302 to queue page, index crappy queue page content and think the product page is crappy, so don't traffic it. They will recrawl the product page once the queue's turned off, only to discover the product has sold out - boo. I very much doubt the search engines will 'wait for a few minutes' so may never end up reaching the product page again. I'm trying to get the markup/product info and optimised meta data injected into the queue page, so that remains present at all points on the journey in the hope that this enables search engines to continue to rank and traffic the product page. What's your take on this? Any suggestions on how we might overcome the issues? (before you ask; avoiding using the queue system is impossible, sorry!) Thanks!1 -
Pages that 301 redirect to a 404
We are going through a website redesign that involves changing URL's for the pages on our site. Currently all our pages are in the format domain.com/example.html and we are moving to stip off the .html file extension so it would just be domain.com/example We have thousands of pages as the site deals with news so building a redirect for each individual page isn't really feasible. My plan is to have a generic rewrite rule that redirects any page that ends .html to the stripped off version of this. A problem I can see with this is that it will also redirect pages that don't exist. So for example, domain.com/non-existant-page.html would 301 to domain.com/non-existant-page which would then return a 404 status. What would the SEO repercussions be for this? Obviously if a page doesn't exist already then it shouldn't show up in the search engine indexes and shouldn't be a problem but I'm a bit worried about how old pages that currently legitimately 404 will be treated when they start to 301 redirect to a 404 instead. Not sure if there any other potential issues from this that I've missed either? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbb0240 -
Starting out on my first site. Feedback and thoughts would be great
My first sports site is ready www.sbat.com/tips and www.sbat.com Content is going in slowly, and signed up for a pro membership on here. Looking to use this site to build up my SEO knowledge. We go live tomorrow, but any early thoughts would be great 🙂 Will be in and around here alot trying to learn from the Gurus Gary
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gillies88880 -
Redirecting index.html to the root
Hi, I was wondering if there is a safe way to consolidate link juice on a single version of a home page. I find incoming links to my site that link to both mysite.com/ and mysite.com/index.html. I've decided to go with mysite.com/ as my main and only URL for the site and now I'd like to transfer all link juice from mysite.com/index.html to mysite.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
When i tried 301 redirect from index.html to the root it created an indefinite loop, of course. I know I can use a RewriteRule.., but will it transfer the juice?? Please help!5 -
Redirection - Seo trick?
Hi, After analyzing the site I found several Redirections of exact match domains. With different domain name extensions. Is Seo trick? Is the second website which i fond that is using this technique. Can anyone gives more details? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
301 redirect for ip address in SERPs
Hi, I've recently had the misfortune of my site's ip address being crawled and indexed by Google, which is causing some duplicate content issues. Due to the nature of the site we're not able to implement a canonical tag to fix this at present. Would a 301 redirect do the trick, and if so, could someone point me to what I'd need to add to our .htaccess file? Many thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHillfd0 -
301 redirect from .html to non .html?
Previously our site was using this as our URL structure: www.site.com/page.html. A few months ago we updated our URL structure to this: www.site.com/page & we're not using the .html. I've read over this guide & don't see anywhere that discusses this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection. I've currently got a programmer looking into, but am always a bit weary with their workarounds, as I'd previously had them cause more problems then fix it. Here is the solution he is looking to do: The way that I am doing the redirect is fine. The problem is of where to put the code. The issue is that the files are .html files that need to be redirected to the same url with out a .html on them. I can see if I can add that to the 404 redirect page if there is one inside of there and see if that does the trick. That way if there is no page that exists without the .html then it will still be a 404 page. However if it is there then it will work as normal. I will see what I can find and get back. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0
