301 redirect hops from non-https and www
-
It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop.
It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain.
The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not
In which case, you could have:
- Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar
- 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page.
Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.
-
Maybe I'm missing something? You can implement an htaccess rewrite rule (or equivalent for your server stack) using regex/host so that essentially
http://example.com/foo OR https://example.com/foo redirect to https://example.com/bar That's the standard approach and serves in one hop. Is there something I'm missing why you're getting into a load balancer etc to accomplish this?P.
-
Hello there,
I´d suggest you to go for the Option 1: two hops.
Google understands well up to 4-5 hops. Matt Cutts said it in these videos:
Can too many redirects from a single URL have a negative effect on crawling? Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site?Also, I think that setting a 301 to a 404, it would give to GoogleBot mixed signals and there could be some cases where you get some links to that 301->404 page and lost that ones.
Best luck!
GR.
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
-
Huge httaccess with old 301 redirects. Is it safe to delete all redirects with no traffic in last 2 months?
We have a huge httaccess file over several MB which seems to be the cause for slow server response time. There are lots of 301 redirects related to site migration from 9 months ago where all old URLs were redirected to new URL and also lots of 301 redirects from URL changes accumulated over the last 15 years. Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ? Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted? Any way to get in google analytics or webmaster tools all 301 that received traffic in the last 2 months or any other easy way to identify those, apart from checking the apache log files ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Site Merge Strategy: Choosing Target Pages for 301 Redirects
I am going to be merging two sites. One is a niche site, and it is being merged with the main site. I am going to be doing 301 redirects to the main site. My question is, what is the best way of redirecting section/category pages in order to maximize SEO benefits. I will be redirecting product to product pages. The questions only concerns sections/categories. Option 1: Direct each section/category to the most closely matched category on the main site. For example, vintage-t-shirts would go to vintage-t-shirt on main site. Option 2: Point as many section/category pages to larger category on main site with selected filters. We have filtered navigation on our site. So if you wanted to see vintage t-shirts, you could go to the vintage t-shirt category, OR you could go to t-shirts and select "vintage" under style filter. In the example above, the vintage-t-shirt section from the niche site would point to t-shirts page with vintage filter selected (something like t-shirts/#/?_=1&filter.style=vintage). With option 2, I would be pointing more links to a main category page on the main site. I would likely have that page rank higher, because more links are pointing to it. I may have a better overall user experience, because if the customer decides to browse another style of t-shirt, they can simply unselect the filter and make other selections. Questions: Which of these options is better as far as: (1) SEO, (2) User experience If I go with option 2, the drawback is that the page titles will all be the same (i.e vintage-t-shirts pointing to the page with filter selected would have "t-shirts" as page title instead of a more targeted page with page title "vintage t-shirts." I believe a workaround would be to pull filter values from the URL and append them to the page title. That way page title for URL t-shirts/#/?=1&filter.style=vintage_ would be something like "vintage, t-shirts." Is this the appropriate way to deal with it? Any thoughts, suggestions, shared experiences would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Multilingual Redirection
Hey there awesome Mozzers, I have a site that it automatically redirects people by using geolocation ( i know that probably is not good ) to the various languages of the site. I just wanted to know Is 301 or 302 the best option? ( I've heard that for language re-directions 302 is the best case scenario ) My main page for example is www.example.com and it automatically redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en for any language that is not there. What is the best case scenario? Leave it to redirect to /en or just leave it go to the root page www.example.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
301 v/s 302 Redirection on Homepage (Multilingual)
Hello, Our website: http://www.luxresorts.com currently has a default 302 redirection to http://www.luxresorts.com/en. We would like to do a 301 redirection instead of a 302 to http://www.luxresorts.com. Our concern is that the site is multilingual and we wonder what effect would the 301 redirection have on search engine crawlers and how would this appear on SERP. When a search is done on Google.com, the English version of our website appears and when on Google.FR, the French version appears. Would the 301 redirection change the way our website appear on Google? Grateful if you could help us out in understanding the pros and cons/best practices for our concern. Thanks in advance. Tej Luchmun.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
For URLs that require login, should our redirect be 301 or 302?
We have a login required section of our website that is being crawled and reporting as potential issues in Webmaster Tools. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is - is it to make URLs requiring a login noindex/nocrawl? Right now, we have them 302 redirecting to the login page, since it's a temporary redirect, it seems like it isn't the right solution. Is a 301 better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alecfwilson0 -
Order and multiple match when 301 redirect ?
Hi, I'm migrating a single domain to a multiple domain for each language, using apache redirections: Redirect 301 /partners http://www.itris-automation.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2MSens
Redirect 301 /partner-si http://www.itris-automation.com/system-integrators-partners
Redirect 301 /partner-institute http://www.itris-automation.com/institutional-partners
Redirect 301 /fr/ http://www.itris-automation.fr/
Redirect 301 /fr/support http://www.itris-automation.fr/support
Redirect 301 /privacy?lang=fr http://www.itris-automation.fr/politique-de-confidentialite Redirect 301 /de/plc-converter http://www.itris-automation.de/plc-converter
Redirect 301 /de/services http://www.itris-automation.de/
Redirect 301 /de/plc-quality http://www.itris-automation.de/sps-qualitat .... However it doesn't work properly: For example automationsquare.com/privacy?lang=fr redirect to http://www.itris-automation.com/privacy instead of http://www.itris-automation.fr/politique-de-confidentialite Does the order of the redirect has an influence? Am I missing something? I've seen that the command [L] can be useful to avoid mismatch? Thanks, Best, Benoit.0 -
Magento Base Install 302 from non www to www , problems?
Using our crawl diagnostics report I am seeing a 302 redirect (temporary) from mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com. It is on an installation of magento with no modifications to the htaccess. This seems problematic, should I change to a 301 in .htaccess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Punkaj0