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
-
Cant find source of redirect
Hey guys, I have a bizarre situation on my hands. I have a URL that is being wonky. The url is redirecting to another url and the 301 redirect is not in my htaccess. There is a 301 redirect in my htaccess but is being overwritten by something else, i.e. whatever is happening in above. So basically URL A should be redirecting to URL B but instead its going to URL C. I know we were not hacked, it's not redirecting to a strange bizarre domain. I have also disabled all of our plugins that redirect (to my knowledge) Any thoughts would be great!
Technical SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
301 redirect syntax for htaccess
I'm working on some htaccess redirects for a few stray pages and have come across a few different varieties of 301s that are confusing me a bit....Most sources suggest: Redirect 301 /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html or using some combination of: RewriteRule + RewriteCond + RegEx I've also found examples of: RedirectPermanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html I'm confused because our current htaccess file has quite a few (working) redirects that look like this: Redirect permanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html This syntax seems to work, but I'm yet to find another Redirect permanent in the wild, only examples of Redirect 301 or RedirectPermanent Is there any difference between these? Would I benefit at all from replacing Redirect permanent with Redirect 301?
Technical SEO | | SamKlep1 -
301 redirect: canonical or non canonical?
Hi, Newbie alert! I need to set up 301 redirects for changed URLs on a database driven site that is to be redeveloped shortly. The current site uses canonical header tags. The new site will also use canonical tags. Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new? Given that the purpose of canonicals is to indicate our preferred URL, then my guess is that's what I should use. However, how can I be sure that Google (for example) has indexed the canonical in every case? Thx in anticipation.
Technical SEO | | ztalk1120 -
Redirect root domain to www
I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below. Does anyone have a solution to this? I'm not 100% sure what to do. Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not? Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages. "Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate." Thanks
Technical SEO | | SeaDrive0 -
301 redirect not working
Hi there! I have recently moved a domain that has been indexed by google and setup redirects so that it forwards to the new domain. It seems like the only redirect that actually is working is the canonical and main domain but every other page and or page nested within a folder are not working. Here is an example of some of the redirects. Am I doing this wrong? It seems to be going to the new domain but can't find the actual pages.... RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | twotd
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !agoodsweep.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://agoodsweep.com/$1 [L,R=301]
redirect 301 woodstoveservicerepair.html http://agoodsweep.com/woodstoveservicerepair/
redirect 301 /westchesterchimney.html http://agoodsweep.com/west-chester-chimney/ Thanks in advance for any help!!0 -
What to do with 302 redirects being indexed
Hi there, Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor. For example: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/ In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL; en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/ (there is no content here, and never has been). This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links. Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting. Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable. But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index? Is the canonical tag the best way? I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | etruvian0 -
Htaccess redirect with question mark
Hi I have a problem setting up my htaccess for a specific page that has a question mark in the link, and one that has a space in the link and also a question mark. So I would like 2 redirects in my htaccess like that: www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=pagename1 to www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=page name2 to www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html I have tried with something like this but doesn't work: RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^page.php?page=pagename1 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html" [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^page.php?page=page name2 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html" [R=301,L] Could someone tell me what exactly I have to change? Thanks
Technical SEO | | darkanweb0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0