Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is there a limit to Internal Redirect?
-
I know Google says there is no limit to it but I have seen on many websites that too many 301 redirects can be a problem and might negatively affect your rankings in SERPs.
I wanted to know especially from people who worked on large ecommerce site. How do they manage internal redirect from one URL to other and how many according to you are too many. I mean if you get a website that contain 300 plus 301 redirections within the website, how will you deal with that?
Please let me know if the question is not clear.
-
Right. Chain redirects = bad.
However, in the same video of Matt Cutts, he does say that the overall amount doesn't matter, and that's what I was talking about in first part of my previous answer.
Now, let's crunch some numbers to show you that the number of no-chain redirects doesn't matter.
-
Assume that we are in perfect world, so all given manufacturer given numbers actually right and all operations per second are actually operations per second
-
Lets say that standard hosting server is 2GHz power = 2*10^9 computations per second
-
Since all htaccess work/computations are strictly on a server side (bots/browsers just send request to server for response if page should be redirected), the only time which can slow down the request is server response time.
-
Match computations are always considered low computation power processes.
-
so, let's say you have htacces with 1 000 000 redirect rules, server keeps it in memory to do match computations when bots make requests, it means that 2GHz server has to have 2000 requests per second to just START struggling.
So, do you have 2000 requests per second to your website and 1 million redirect rules?
P.S. All number above are very rough approximations
P.P.S. If you really wanna see if your server is/ would struggle - login into web host manager, go to server status and info, look and see how much of your server power is usually being used. Usually that number is lower than 6-7% at 90% of the time.
Hope this clarify some things
-
-
I am going to say what I do and how I think that it works. I am not saying that this is correct or best practice.
When I abandon a URL I do not place the redirect in the .htaccess file in the root directory. Instead, I place an .htaccess file in the folder where the URL was saved. That limits the size of my .htaccess file in the root directory. I believe that reduces the amount of work that your server must do, it does not need to examine a very large .htaccess file.
If you use many folders to categorize your content then you will have small .htaccess files that are easier to manage. From time to time you will be able to redirect entire folders instead of individual files when you abandon a product line or a category of content.
That's what I do.
-
I think you get me wrong, you are talking probably talking about chain redirects as in from a to b and than b to c and may be d. For this Matt himself said in one of his Webmaster videos that Google might not crawl the link after 2 or may be 3 stages.
I am more concern about redirects in total because redirect increase the page load time and page load time is a factor in Google rankings which make me think again before go ahead and set 1000+ redirection (for example)!
But thanks for your reply!
-
I've not seen any instances of a limit to how many redirects you can have pointing to your website. I have some clients who have thousands of redirects in place (lots of old pages being moved to a new version of that product). Those sites haven't had any issues with rankings at all. In fact, many of the links pointing to the sites still reference the URLs that are redirected and those pages that are redirected to are ranking perfectly fine.
The biggest limit I've seen is on chaining. I've seen issues where chained redirects simply aren't followed. However, if you can keep it to a 1 step redirect, or 2, then things should be okay. It doesn't sound like that is what you are asking about though. More from Matt Cutts on this:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-discusses-301-permanent-redirects-limits-on-websites/46611/In terms of managing those redirects, you can't usually keep this many on an htaccess file without going a little bit nuts (or risking some future dev deleting those in an effort to clean up the htaccess file - ug). If you are using WordPress, the 301 redirects plugin works quite well: https://wordpress.org/plugins/301-redirects/
Unfortunately, I've also run into sites that aren't in a CMS where you can use a plugin. In those cases, I usually put these redirects in a database table. On the 404 file, I then have the code check the would-be error URL to see if we need to redirect that URL somewhere else. If a redirect is place, it redirects instead of throwing the 404 error. If no redirect is in place, the code then throws a 404 error.
Hope that helps.
-
Hello, my friend.
Well, whenever people says "don't have too many redirects", it doesn't mean not to have too many redirects in total count, for example, if you have old page
a.php redirected to b.php,
and old page c.php redirected to d.php
and so on - there is no any problem. However, what they mean is not to have consecutive redirects - eg.:a.php redirects to b.php, which redirects to c.php, which redirects to d.php, instead of a.php redirecting to d.php straight forward.
Hope this helps.
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
-
I have a question about the impact of a root domain redirect on site-wide redirects and slugs.
I have a question about the impact (if any) of site-wide redirects for DNS/hosting change purposes. I am preparing to redirect the domain for a site I manage from https://siteImanage.com to https://www.siteImanage.com. Traffic to the site currently redirects in reverse, from https://www.siteImanage.com to https://siteImanage.com. Based on my research, I understand that making this change should not affect the site’s excellent SEO as long as my canonical tags are updated and a 301 redirect is in place. But I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a potential consequence of this switch I’m not considering. Because this redirect lives at the root of all the site’s slugs and existing redirects, will it technically produce a redirect chain or a redirect loop? If it does, is that problematic? Thanks for your input!
Technical SEO | | mollykathariner_ms0 -
My homepage redirects to itself?
Hi there - I'm not a SEO so help would be appreciated! Moz is telling me we have a redirect loop but the URLs are the same. https://www.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/ Why is my homepage creating a redirect loop to itself? We use Wordpress and I do not have any redirects listed for our homepage. Could this have something to do with switching to https in April? Thanks, Katherine
Technical SEO | | kmmartin0 -
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
DNS vs IIS redirection
I'm working on a project where a site has gone through a rebrand and is therefore also moving to a new domain name. Some pages have been merged on the new site so it's not a lift and shift job and so I'm writing up a redirect plan. Their IT dept have asked if we want redirects done by DNS redirect or IIS redirect. Which one will allow us to have redirects on a page level and not a domain level? I think IIS may be the right route but would love your thoughts on this please.
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Today1 -
Https redirect when certificate expired
Hi, How do we 301 an https version of a domain to a page on another website when the security certificate has run out? We have 301 redirected the http version but IT stuck on how to do the expired https. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
International Site Links In Footer
We have several international sites and we have them linked in the footer of our main .com site . Should we add "nofollow" to these links? Our concern is that Google could see these sites as a network?
Technical SEO | | EwanFisher0 -
Redirecting Entire Microsite Content to Main Site Internal Pages?
I am currently working on improving site authority for a client site. The main site has significant authority, but I have learned that the company owns several other resource-focused microsites which are stagnant, but which have accrued significant page authority of their own (thought still less than the main site). Realizing the fault in housing good content on a microsite rather than the main site, my thought is that I can redirect the content of the microsites to internal pages on the main site as a "Resources" section. I am wondering a: if this is a good idea and b: the best way to transfer site authority from these microsites. I am also wondering how to organize the content and if, for example, an entire microsite domain (e.g. microsite.com) should in fact be redirected to internal resource pages (e.g. mainsite.com/resources). Any input would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | RightlookCreative1 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | | dballari0