Redirects Advice Please
-
Hi All,
I have been approached by someone to look at their website who has seen a rank drop over the last week of around 15 places.
On a quick look at their website I have seen what I am imaging could be the culprit as I imagine it will be creating a re-direct loop. However, i am not 100% with these things so would like some others opinions.com
They have a wordpress website.
There home page lets say https://theirsite.com/
They have an internal page built for a search term https://www.theirsite.com/keyword
In wordpress they have set that page in settings to be the homepage.
However, I looked on their server and via htaccess they have a 301 redirect from https://www.theirsite.com/keyword to https://www.theirsite.com/
So the questions are:
1. Could this be creating a loop?
2. The redirect was placed around a week before the rank drop. Could this possibly be the cause of the drop?
3. I am assuming that removing the 301 from htaccess is recommended?
Thanks in advance for any advice
-
Hi Dale
If that loop you have specified there was true then the homepage wouldn't show up.
https://www.theirsite.com/keyword>https://www.theirsite.com/>https://www.theirsite.com/keyword ad infinitum...
It would just keep on going and Google wouldn't be able to show the page.
You could use Screaming Frog to check for redirect chains - SEMrush and MOZ also pick them up so scanning the site would be my preferred option before touching it. Failing that I would remove it and see what happens.
Regards Nigel
-
Hi There,
This is a common practice and a very common redirect example. and I have seen them contributing to the homepage/main website authority. You can use it and analyze the impact before making any further changes. I had a client who has a very valuable page with content with a certain keyword, they later on 301 redirected the page to the homepage along with the content, this had a very positive impact for their main page DA for that specific keyword. But, I would recommend testing and analyzing everything before reaching a conclusion.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have further questions.
Regards,
Vijay
-
Inside PHPMyAdmin, Check WP-Options and make sure the website in the 2 spots it's entered are correct.
-
Thanks. The guy is actually not using cloudflare in this case. His htaccess file is structurally correct, the only issue I am unsure about is the fact that there was a 301 redirect from the page set as front page in wordpress to the homepage url.
Obviously this is not standard practice and I am going to remove it, but I was wondering about peoples opinions to see if that 301 redirect would of been causing a loop.
Thanks again
-
Where I most often see a redirect loop is when someone switches over to CloudFlare on the WordPress platform. If it isn't CloudfFare causing this redirect then the first thing you'll probably want to do is change the .htaccess file name to something else and make sure it's baked up then create a new one. First try this stock base .htaccess:
# BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> # END WordPress
Then you go down the checklist
- Delete the newly created htaccess file and allow WordPress the opportunity to create one on it's own
- Change the name of the plugins folder to temporarily disable plugins to see if that's the cause
- change the name of the active theme folder to force the use of a stock theme.
It will very likely be one of those items causing the redirect. The only other thing it could be is if Wordpress just got relocated and is pointing at a different domain. In which case you would need to change that in PHPMyAdmin under WP-Options.
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
-
Http to https redirection issue
Hi, i have a website with http but now i moved to https. when i apply 301 redirection from http to https & check in semrush it shows unable to connect with https & similar other tool shows & when i remove redirection all other tools working fine but my https version doesn't get indexed in google. can anybosy help what could be the issue?
Technical SEO | | dhananjay.kumar10 -
Redirecting a questionable domain to a trusted domain
I have a question!
Technical SEO | | FDFPres
We have 2 domains operating within the same retail sector. One of them is for our bricks and mortar business and the other is a new brand we launched as a nationwide e-retailer. We aggressively built links for the new one and achieved some very good search positioning, where we remained for about 4 months until the google updates of the first half of this year started biting. The domain never received a warning from google or anything, but the links have clearly been devalued to a point where the domain is now virtually buried for the most competitive terms. However, the domain does still get around 100-200 visitors per day, and has a DA of 38. We're thinking about a reshuffle that would involve putting the products in to our brick and mortar business website, and redirecting the brand domain to the bricks and mortar domain. Thank you for reading this far! the question is then, is there a danger of the bricks and mortar domain being tarnished by this? as i said the brand domain hasn't had any notices of penalty from google but it has definitely been hit by updates.0 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TroyW0 -
302 redirects help
Hello, I have a Magento ecommerce store and my latest seomoz crawl report shows over 10,000 302 redirects. An example is this below https://jsshirts.com.au/wishlist/index/add/product/160/ which is being redirected to http://jsshirts.com.au/enable-cookies Can anyone please help me with a solution to help with this problem. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | mullsey0 -
How to write 301 redirects in WordPress
I've successfully migrated new site to new domain (www.cmsearchmarketing.com) But I cannot get 301 redirects for pages and blog posts to redirect from the old domain (www.creativemindsearchmarketing.com). And it's my understanding I need to do a 301 for each page to maintain SEO. Here's what I've tried: RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^p=975$RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.cmsearchmarketing.com/top-5-questions-to-ask-an-seo-firm-before-signing-up/? [R=301,L] BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule># END WordPress #AND ALSO# Use PHP5 Single php.ini as defaultAddHandler application/x-httpd-php5s .php BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule># END WordPress redirect 301 /top-5-questions-to-ask-an-seo-firm-before-signing-up http://www.cmsearchmarketing.com/top-5-questions-to-ask-an-seo-firm-before-signing-up/ Any suggestions would be appreciated. _Cindy P.S. Maybe some other issues are in the way: --Old site is WP-Remix theme no longer supported, and latest WP version is 2.9.1 -- Old domain (www.creativemindsearchmarketing.com) is the primary account on BlueHost …and the new domain (www.cmsearchmarketing.com) is an addon, so the new domain's directory is within root of old domain. -- in root domain of old site there are other "handler files" that also have base file rewrites, if this is an issue: name of this file in root directory is:
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar
.htaccess.addHandlerBak -FrontPage- <limit get="" post="">order deny,allowdeny from allallow from all</limit><limit put="" delete="">order deny,allowdeny from all</limit>AuthUserFile /home/creatjo7/public_html/_vti_pvt/service.pwdAuthGroupFile /home/creatjo7/public_html/_vti_pvt/service.grp# BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPressAuthName creativemindsearchmarketing.comIndexIgnore .htaccess /.?? *~ *# /HEADER /README /_vti0 -
Domain targeting advice needed please
I would be interested in hearing the views of other seomozers on this issue please. I have a web server hosted in The Netherlands which I currently host my sites on, it is super fast (16core 24gb ram) and in 8 months has had 4 mins of downtime! On this server I wish to build a couple of ecommerce stores. However this is where my issue lays The first store I launch will be targeted at the UK market, however the domain I wish to use for it is a .com domain which has a moz ranting of about 36 (better than most of my competitors, worse than a few so it's a good headstart). The problem I would then have is a .com domain hosted on a Dutch server targeting UK people. Even if I was to set the webmaster tools location to UK it would not be ideal. Also, when it comes to launching the US site I would then be looking at using a .us domain which is far from ideal The other option I have is to use the .co.uk domain for the UK site but this is new and lack any decent moz score. Given this I am now pondering the following set up....using the .com domain on the Dutch server but putting the UK store in domain.com/UK and the future usa store in domain.com/usa. Would this be the best work around? I could then set the location of folders in the webmaster tools? Also, I plan on using geo redirecting on the domain so if a uk page happens to rank in the USA listings the user gets automatically redirected to the nearest matching product available in their country in the /us/ folder. Would this be easiest to work with on just one domain as it wouldn't technically be redirecting people to another site as per using two domains. Any thoughts would be good. Not even sure I have managed to explain it very clearly hehe
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Redirects
Hello, My question is: how important is it to wait for the a redirect to get seen and cached before you take down the old page? More in depth: my old platform has seriously limited my ability to add sitemaps and make edits to htacces. I just want to change nameservers (which will delete everything on there) and upload the htaccess is that alright? Another way of saying it: when redirecting a page, is it necessary for google to see the old page before it is deleted? Thanks Tyler
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Redirect and ranking
Wehave 2 websites for the same keyword Website 1 is indexed on place 2 but we do not like that name any longer it does not fit our long term marketing Website 2 is indexed on place 5 and this domain fits better What will happen if we redirect website 1 to website 2? Fall down to postion 5 Fall down to position 5 and after a certain period we get back at position 2 or 3 thanx in advance for your reply
Technical SEO | | turnon0