301 redirects
-
One of our employees took an SEO class recently. She was told that having too many 301 redirects can hurt SEO. I have never heard of 301 redirects as having a negative impact. Any thoughts?
-
Load time isn't that much, same domain redirects only take 16-25ms. I would be more concerned with cross domain redirects.
-
I would also be concerned with load time and the effect it can have on user experience and bounces back into the serps.
-
There is no limit to the number of redirects that Google is willing to crawl within a site. However, there's a limit to the number of redirect chains that they'll crawl. A redirect chain is when one page redirects to a page that redirects to a page that redirects ... and so on.
-
It can have a negative impact if you have redirect chains. Matt Cutts discusses 301 redirects and their impact.
-
Having too many 301 redirects in a chain can have a non-positive impact. I.e. Don't 301 a page to another page that 301s to another page that 301s to another page, etc. etc. etc. Google once stated they could do 5 pages in a 301 chain before giving up. But honestly, why would you choose to redirect to a redirecting page when you could point it at something much more relevant? But as for having a bulk of 301s, I wouldn't worry. If you had 300 different pages that were all being redirected to 300 other pages, google would not devalue you for it. If your redirects are relevant and are good for the user experience, then you're fine.
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
-
Recovering from an open redirect
From a previous company we have inherited a domain which once contained an open redirect redirect.magnet.me. Even though this domain has been returning a 410 for every single request directed at it for the last few months, we continue to see new links popping up in Google which refer to this domain https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=%22redirect.magnet.me%22 Currently we just keep disavowing these links, but at the same time they keep appearing in our Moz.com tooling, being unable to disavow those links here. Does anybody have any successful tips how to deal with this scenario, compared to only disavow new links after the fact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rogier_slag0 -
301 Redirect and Canonical link tag pointing in opposite directions!
I'm working on a site which redirects the non-WWW version to WWW version so, for example https://website.com/page redirects to https://www.website.com/page However, canonical link tags have been set up on the page - pointing back to the non-WWW so for example Q - is this going to cause issues and should the canonical be updated to the same version as the redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII0 -
How to get rid of two 301 redirects?
I have two 301s from http://www. to https://non-www version of my site. I wonder how can get rid of one so it will look like this: 301-200 instead of 301-301-200 All other combinations work fine and give me 301-200 status codes. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lovemozforever0 -
301 Redirect from unused domain
Hi All First question here so go easy.. I have a property site which is working well so far considering it;s early days, unfortunately some of my earlier efforts did not go so well and one in particular I pretty much destroyed in my attempts to improve the site SEO. Lucky enough my SEO skills have improved quite a bit lately, largely thanks to the great tools, tutorials and experts here at Moz 🙂 My question is whether I can use a 301 redirect to pass the domain authority and any link equity from an unused site to the one that ive done a better job on? it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy... Thanks everyone and thanks for all the help over the last 6 months or so.. Wes Dunn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wesdunn19771 -
How should we 301 redirecting ecommerce microsite to our larger ecommmerce site? Should we?
We have several microsites (by microsite I mean sites that are basically top-level departments of our main ecommerce site. We continue to run these, without much support, and they do generate a few sales but we simply don't have the resources to grow them or manage them effectively. We have "kicked around" the idea of 301 redirecting them to our main ecommerce site with the idea that any additional SEO value would be greater than the few sales they currently generate. All products that are on our microsites can be found on our main ecommerce site, thus we can redirect products on our microsites to the exact product on our main site. How would you treat these sites? Would you 301 redirect them? If so, how would you do it? What would be some considerations if we decide to 301 redirect? Microsite example: http://www.drinkingstuff.com/ Main site: http://www.prankplace.com/ I would greatly appreciate any tidbits the community could provide us on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Istoresinc0 -
URL Structure Change - 301 Redirect - on large website
Hi Guys, I have a website which has approximately 15 million pages indexed. We are planning to change url structure of 99.99% of pages but it would remain on same domain. eg: older url: xyz.com/nike-shoes; new url: xyx.com/shopping/nike-shoes A benefit that we would get is adding a related and important keyword in url. We also achieve other technical benefits in identifying the page type before hand and can reduce time taken to serve the pages (as per our tech team). For older URLs, we are planning to do a 301 redirect. While this seems to be the correct thing to do as per Google, we do see that there is a very large number of cases where people have suffered significantly on doing something like this : Here are our questions: Will all page rank value will be passed to new url? (i.e. will there be a 100% passing of PR/link juice to the new URLs) Can it lower my rank for keywords? (currently we have pretty good rankings (1-5) on many keywords) If there is an impact on rankings - will it be only on specific keywords or will we see a sitewide impact? Assuming that we have taken a hit on traffic, How much time would it take to get the traffic back to normal? and if traffic goes down, by what percentage it may go down and for how much time. (best case, average case and worst case scenarios) Is there anything I should keep in mind while doing this? I understand that there are no clear answers that can be given to these questions but we would like to evaluate a worst case/best case situation. Just to give context : Even a 10 day downtime in terms of drops in rankings is extremely detrimental for our business.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Myntra0 -
How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
I have encountered some issue with 301 redirect and htaccess file. I need to redirect the following url: http://www.domain.com/?specifications=colours/page/3 to: http://www.domain.com/colours The 301 redirect command I wrote in htaccess file is as follow: Redirect 301 /?specifications=colours/page/3 http://www.domain.com/colours And it doesn't work at the moment. What is the correct way to set up 301 redirect here? Your help will be sincerely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0 -
301 Redirect to a new domain, Need linkbuilding ideas
Hi, I just 301 redirected my 3 year old domain to a new domain which was created yesterday. Now i want to start link building to my new domain. Should i start slowly by publishing 4-5 articles on article directories and a 1 press release a week? Can someone suggest me some ideas on how to handle a new domain. Will be waiting for replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dex3783783780