Redirect chains and rankings
-
Hi All,
I've got interesting question for Moz community today. Has redirect chain got any impact on rankings or not?
Thank you in advance.
-
Hi, similar response to Andreas but I suppose a bit stronger. Rule of thumb is that with every redirect you use up Google's processing power (meaning it's likely to spend less time elsewhere on your site) and that you lose some link equity at each step. So, if we're answering the question "is a redirect chain less-than-ideal for SEO?" then I would say yes - we should remove redirect chains where we can.
However, the question we're answering is "does a redirect chain have any impact on rankings?" To be honest there is a huge range there. If we're talking about one redirect chain, which has two hops (the least problematic version of having a redirect chain) then it's probably unlikely to cause too many issues. It'd be a nice-to-fix but not something I'd spend 5 hours dev time sorting out. If you're talking about thousands of links on your site going through multiple redirect hops, that becomes much more problematic and I'd want to get that fixed more urgently.
Unfortunately, as with many things in SEO, the answer here is "it depends". Hope that helps!
-
depends, if 302 redirects included sure it has an impact. Also it is not great for crawling, not for your tools like moz, not for google - but more important imho - a redirect costs time, time a user may not want to spent. So I guess you want to reduce redirects to speed up your site. And of course it is best practice to have no redirects linked internally.
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
-
Is it a good practice to reduce number of redirections (301) after a period of time?
Is it good to use disavow tool and get rid of old URLs i.e. links for pages and posts which we have deleted from our website and added 301 on them?
On-Page Optimization | | Ravi_Rana0 -
Is this method of redirecting of 404 okay?
Hi all, This is my first post at this forum 🙂 I'am running a Opencart shop with a SEO extension installed. This extension has a redirect module which works like this. When visiting the site on 404 url (and if there is setup a redirect for that url). It serves the correct content but on the 404 url with the correct url set in rel canonical. For example: Try visit this url:
On-Page Optimization | | mrmagnecom
https://makitech.no/ventilasjon/ventilasjons-pakketilbud
Here i have setup a redirect to the correct content, which is actually this url https://makitech.no/pakketilbud I am used to use a 301 header redirect so the user get redirected to the correct url. So my question is this. Is it a okay practice to serve the content on the 404 url (it responds 200) when the correct url is set in canonical? Any thoughts?0 -
Htaccess redirect, from /year/month to /blog
I am trying to make some redirects so we don't lose that SEO juice. I am trying to move our blog structure from:
On-Page Optimization | | opiates
http://www.domain.com/2015/09/title-of-blog to:
http://www.domain.com/blog/title-of-blog I need to do redirects in htaccess from the old structure to the new structure but I can't seem to get it working properly. Here is what I have thus far. <code>RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^(.0-9)\/^(.0-9)\$ $1/ [R=301,L]</code> Any suggestions?0 -
General drop in rankings
We've made a LOT of improvements to our on page SEO and we've been on the right track, but since about 26/7 our rankings appears to have gone down. Since early 2015 we've reworked a lot of the copy on our site to improve the unique/duplicate ratio, we've redone a lot of urls that didn't make any sense. We've improved image alt-text and file names. We've reduced image size on most of the site and we have disavowed spam links (obvious ones like nike shoes and oakley glasses). We've basically improved on-site SEO as much as we can with headers and whatnot. We've been hacked 4 times since January and we had two partial manual penalties from Google, but they were quickly dealt with and we've switched server to one that is both safer and a lot faster. Most of the hacked content seems to have disappeared from Googles index but not all of it. We have also tried our best to deal with URL parameters and we've made 301's out of hundreds of URLs with duplicate content from old slideshows that basically only had an image. And there's even more things we've done like working a lot more with social media, but despite all that were loosing ranking every week and our SEOlytics SVR is at its lowest since early 2014. And we've never (afaik) bought links or anything like that. Obviously we're doing something wrong but frankly we're running out of ideas. We've lost rankings on individual important phrases but there's site-wide general drop.
On-Page Optimization | | Emil_780 -
Why are my rankings down?
My rankings seem to be going down all the time. Any idea why? www.rewardcharts4kids.com Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nicolebd0 -
Need help ranking my site
Hi, Can anyone help me out? I am trying to get this site ranked for "Villa General Belgrano". It was on the first page of Google and then it disappeared. Did I over optimize the anchor text? http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.lawebdelvalle.com.ar
On-Page Optimization | | Carla_Dawson0 -
How important are internal pages to overall site rank?
This seems like it should be an easy question (and probably is), but it has stumped a few of us over the past few days. Here's the scenario: We have a site that we are trying to optimize to rank well for a set of keywords. We have a lot of internal pages that are important to users when they visit the site (case studies, for example), but they aren't the pages that we want people to find when they search for our primary keywords. Our question is, is it valuable to optimize those internal pages for our keywords? In other words, will having a lot of internal pages that mention our keywords affect how well our overall site ranks for those keywords? Or, is it only important to have one "hero" page for our important keywords? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | omg_jlsa0 -
Www redirect
I get the following message when I try to start a new campaign. "We have detected that the domain www.shewula.nl and the domain shewula.nl both respond to web requests and do not redirect" In the q&a I found answers to this problem and tried to fix it. No success yet. This is what I have in my old ht.access file: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.shewula.nl$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/STICHTING_SHEWULA/ RewriteRule (.*) /STICHTING_SHEWULA/$1 [last] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^shewula.nl$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/STICHTING_SHEWULA/ RewriteRule (.*) /STICHTING_SHEWULA/$1 [last] I changed it to ( got it from the answers 😞 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^shewula.nl
On-Page Optimization | | thomasfasting
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.shewula.nl/$1 [R=301,L] This gave me a 500 internal error in the server header checker tool. Does anybody know how I can fix this? The website is in a folder in the root of my other website www.fastingfotografie.nl Could this give me a problem? Thanks. Thomas0