HTTPS & 301s
-
Hi
- We have like most set up a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS.
- We also changed our website and set up redirects from .ASP pages to PHP pages
- We are now seeing 2 redirects in place for the whole of the website.
http.www.domain.com > https.www.domain.com (1) >> oldwebpage.asp >> new webpage.php (2)
The question is: Is there anyway of making the redirect 1 and not 2?
thanks
Enver -
Just to make sure I understand. Can you clarify the sequence of the changes and for how long? Do you know if one set of URLs has links to it or was ever indexed.
Let me explain.
It sounds like you had a site that was using http and was an asp site. So you had URLs like
http://www.website.com/file.asp (we will call this URL type A)
You then converted to https so the URLs were like
https://www.website.com/file.asp (we will call this URL type B)
You then updated to a PHP site so now with URLs are like this
https://www.website.com/file.php (we will call this URL type C)
You can setup 301s to go from A to B and then another set to go from B to C. Your question is can you setup a 301 to go from A to C, the answer is yes. You should do this. Anytime you can reduce the number of hops the better.
What you need to think about is, well, that about the A to B and the B to C redirects? Well, I would say at a minimum, you need to eliminate the A to B 301s as you have now decided to skip the "B" and go right to C. That works. What about the B to C 301 redirect? It depends. If you had version B of the website out for a while, and it was indexed by Google and you have links that are built to B version URLs, then yes, you need to leave the B to C redirects. You don't want to lose any of that equity.
Likewise, let's say you have a version D of the site that comes out a year later. You have lots of links into the C version of the site.
https://www.website.com/file.html
You then need the A urls to 301 to the D URLs (and get rid of the A to C 301s), you need the B URL to 301 to the D URLs and so on. In other words, go through another process of cleaning up the 301s and reducing the hops.
Why do all this. Two reasons. There will still be links to the A, B, C versions of the site. Google will still find them and crawl them and you want to get credit for those links to your site. Also, Google keeps an internal log of URLs and will check them from time to time, even if no one is linking to them. You want Google to find the right URL. In either case, if Google hits a version A URL, it would then have to go to version B via a 301 and then to version C. It can do it, but it would rather have 1 hop.
Side note. Try not to use global 301s, where you just 301 a bunch of pages to the home page. That does nothing for you as far as link equity. Try and make the 301s a 1 to 1 relationship as much as possible.
Take a look at this video and this backs up what I just said. The number of hops is discussed at about 3 min in. The whole video is worth watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA
-
I'm not sure I understand. What is wrong with the ASP -> PHP redirect?
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
-
Resolving 301 Redirect Chains from Different URL Versions (http, https, www, non-www)
Hi all, Our website has undergone both a redesign (with new URLs) and a migration to HTTPS in recent years. I'm having difficulties ensuring all URLs redirect to the correct version all the while preventing redirect chains. Right now everything is redirecting to the correct version but it usually takes up to two redirects to make this happen. See below for an example. How do I go about addressing this, or is this not even something I should concern myself with? Redirects (2) <colgroup><col width="123"><col width="302"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | theyoungfirm
| Redirect Type | URL |
| | http://www.theyoungfirm.com/blog/2009/index.html 301 | https://theyoungfirm.com/blog/2009/index.html 301 | https://theyoungfirm.com/blog/ | This code below was what we added to our htaccess file. Prior to adding this, the various subdomain versions (www, non-www, http, etc.) were not redirecting properly. But ever since we added it, it's now created these additional URLs (see bolded URL above) as a middle step before resolving to the correct URL. RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Your feedback is much appreciated. Thanks in advance for your help. Sincerely, Bethany0 -
How to resolve warning of pages with redirect chain when its your http:// to https://www.
how do I write a 301 redirect in the htaccess file so that http:// goes straight to https://www. Moz replyEli profileHey there!Thanks for reaching out to us!
Technical SEO | | VelocityWebsites0 -
Hi Mozers, is the AMP project is supposed to be an SEO factor on mobile platforms? Also, can it be used on ecommerce sites such as Magento or Shopify as well? Thanks!
It stands to reason that Google will favor early adopters of Accelerated Mobile Pages, but it seems heavily geared toward news publishers so far. What about regular Wordpress sites, or ecommerce sites like Shopify, should AMP be pursued on that type of CMS?
Technical SEO | | CalamityJane771 -
From: http://www. to https://
Hi all, I am changing my hosting for legal and SEO reasons from http://www to https:// . Now I hear different stories on the redirects: 1: should i try and change my backlinks? 2: internally all links will be 301 redirected at first. Than I want to (manually) change them. It;s within Wordpress so there should be a plugin for this. Tips? 3: Will it affect my rankings and for what period? What I now know that at first it will drop little but eventually you will rank higher than before. Thanks so much in advance! Tymen
Technical SEO | | Tymen1 -
Same H1 & H2 Tags
Is it bad to have the same H1 & H2 tag on one page? I found a similar question here on the moz forum but it didn't exactly answer my question. And will adding "about" on the H2 help, or should we avoid duplicate tags completely? Here is a link to the page in question (which will repeat throughout this site.) Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Google Search Console Site Map Anomalies (HTTP vs HTTPS)
Hi I've just done my usual Monday morning review of clients Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) dashboard and disturbed to see that for 1 client the Site Map section is reporting 95 pages submitted yet only 2 indexed (last time i looked last week it was reporting an expected level of indexed pages) here. It says the sitemap was submitted on the 10th March and processed yesterday. However in the 'Index Status' its showing a graph of growing indexed pages up to & including yesterday where they numbered 112 (so looks like all pages are indexed after all). Also the 'Crawl Stats' section is showing 186 pages crawled on the 26th. Then its listing sub site-maps all of which are non HTTPS (http) which seems very strange since the site is HTTPS and has been for a few months now and the main sitemap index url is an HTTPS: https://www.domain.com/sitemap_index.xml The sub sitemaps are:http://www.domain.com/marketing-sitemap.xmlhttp://www.domain.com/page-sitemap.xmlhttp://www.domain.com/post-sitemap.xmlThere are no 'Sitemap Errors' reported but there are 'Index Error' warnings for the above post-sitemap, copied below:_"When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some of the URLs were unreachable. Please check your webserver for possible misconfiguration, as these errors may be caused by a server error (such as a 5xx error) or a network error between Googlebot and your server. All reachable URLs will still be submitted." _
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Also for the below site map URL's: "Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page" for:http://domain.com/en/post-sitemap.xmlANDhttps://www.domain.com/page-sitemap.xmlAND https://www.domain.com/post-sitemap.xmlI take it from all the above that the HTTPS sitemap is mainly fine and despite the reported 0 pages indexed in GSC sitemap section that they are in fact indexed as per the main 'Index Status' graph and that somehow some HTTP sitemap elements have been accidentally attached to the main HTTPS sitemap and the are causing these problems.What's best way forward to clean up this mess ? Resubmitting the HTTPS site map sounds like right option but seeing as the master url indexed is an https url cant see it making any difference until the http aspects are deleted/removed but how do you do that or even check that's what's needed ? Or should Google just sort this out eventually ? I see the graph in 'Crawl > Sitemaps > WebPages' is showing a consistent blue line of submitted pages but the red line of indexed pages drops to 0 for 3 - 5 days every 5 days or so. So fully indexed pages being reported for 5 day stretches then zero for a few days then indexed for another 5 days and so on ! ? Many ThanksDan0 -
Mass 301s
Hi All, im trying to find a way to do a mass list of 301s instead of just doing them individually, does anyone have any ideas or tips into how i can do this?
Technical SEO | | Kennelstore0 -
Blocking https from being crawled
I have an ecommerce site where https is being crawled for some pages. Wondering if the below solution will fix the issue www.example.com will be my domain In the nav there is a login page www.example.com/login which is redirecting to the https://www.example.com/login If I just disallowed /login in the robots file wouldn't it not follow the redirect and index that stuff? The redirect part is what I am questioning.
Technical SEO | | Sean_Dawes0