What are the effects of having Multiple Redirects for pages under the same domain

[eukmark]

Dear Mozers,

First of all let me wish you all a Very Happy, Prosperous, Healthy, Joyous & Successful New Year !

I'm trying to analyze one of the website's Web Hosting UK Com Ltd. and during this process I've had this question running through my mind. This project has been live since the year 2003 and since then there have be changes made to the website (obviously). There have also been new pages been added, the same way some new pages have even been over-written with changes in the url structures too.

Now, coming back to the question, if I've have a particular url structure in the past when the site was debuted and until date the structure has been changes thrice (for example) with a 301 redirect to every back dated structure, WOULD it impact the sites performance SEOwise ? And let's say that there's hundreds of such redirections under the same domain, don't you think that after a period of time we should remove the past pages/urls from the server ? That'd certainly increase the 404 (page not found) errors, but that can be taken care of.

How sensible would it be to keep redirecting the bots from one url to the other when they only visit a site for a short stipulated time?

To make it simple let me explain it with a real life scenario. Say if I was staying a place A then switched to a different location in another county say B and then to C and so on, and finally got settled at a place G. When I move from one place to another, I place a note of the next destination I'm moving to so that any courier/mail etc. can be delivered to my current whereabouts. In such a case there's a less chance that the courier would travel all the destinations to deliver the package. Similarly, when a bot visits a domain and it finds multiple redirects, don't you think that it'd loose the efficiency in crawling the site?

Ofcourse, imo. the redirects are important, BUT it should be there (in htaccess) for only a period of say 3-6 months. Once the search engine bots know about the latest pages, the past pages/redirects should be removed.

What are your opinions about this ?

[katemorris]

Both answers so far get to one of the points that I was going to make, always update redirects so that there is not a chain, but I wanted to add something else. You only need redirects as long as someone is linking to those pages. You should be taking time to fix any internal references to changed URLs and contacting websites that link to the old URLs and asking them to change the URLs. That should be a part of any site URL change.

If you have only revised your URLs once, you only need redirects for 3-6 months while the search engines reindex everything. In that time, you should have changed all links to the old URLs.

In your case, I'd drop all old redirects except for the last one and see what 404s you get. Find the referring site, and contact them to change the link to your site. Once that is all done, then you can work on this latest revision to change those links.

Hope that helps!

[MikeRoberts]

It is always best to do a one to one redirect instead of a chain. As Federico said, there is some pagerank loss when doing a redirect (though the exact amount is debatable and may be neglible) and redirecting A to B to C compounds the problem. On top of that, too many redirects in a chain will lead Googlebot to stop crawling the chain. One or two is fine, three or more is not. In this older video http://youtu.be/r1lVPrYoBkA Matt Cutts started talking about redirect chains at around 2:48 and mentions that one, two and maybe three in a chain is fine. This Whiteboard Interview from 2010 with Matt Cutts http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more also states the 1 or 2 301s in a chain. So if you're redirecting  A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F... you're possibly hurting yourself. Where possible you should change the redirects so its A to F, B to F, C to F, D to F and E to F. As for removing the redirects after a certain number of months, I'd check to see how many people are still linking in with that older URL. You'd want to ask sites linking in to update to the newest URL before you 404 it and lose those links. And if you're still getting tons of direct traffic coming in on an old 301 then you might want to do some digging & research before you cut off that traffic. Odds are though after a few months you wouldn't be getting as much traffic coming through on the older URL but there is always the possibility.

[FedeEinhorn]

Every time you make a redirect, 301, some of the pagerank is diluted. So following your example, from going from A to C you should redirect both A and B to C, not A -> B -> C as you double the loss.

Redirects are just fine, and in my opinion, they should say for as long as the pages being redirected still get organic traffic (backlinks, search, etc.). The moment you see no more traffic, and the links pointing to that redirected page fixed (point to the new page) you can safely remove the redirection. For as on the amount of redirects, it won't be a problem if you have lots of them, unless you do multiple redirects from A to G going from one page to the other until reaching the final, working version.

If that's not your scenario and A redirects directly to G, then you are fine. Monitor traffic on A and see if at some point you can remove the redirection, otherwise just leave is there (I personally have redirects that have been there for over 3 years as the pages are still getting organic traffic (mainly from links).

Hope that helps! And a happy new year to you too!