Ugly Redirect Chain
-
Hey everyone,
Hoping to get your take on this:
- We have some very high demand products, they usually sell out in minutes (lucky us, eh?!)
- We are implementing a queue function on a product page - basically if too many people try to check out at the same time, we dump them in a queue
- The queue could kick in before or after search engines have indexed the product page
- The product page has markup and on-page content relating to the product.
- The queue page exists on an external (yes, external) site
- The queue page will not have any of the product info, markup, or optimised page title
- Product page will 302 to queue page and starts a series of 302 redirects!
Here's the sequence when queue is active:
- CANONICAL product page (with markup, on-page product info, optimised page title, etc.)
>> 302 >> - queue page on external domain (ZERO markup, product info or page title)
>>302>> - same queue page, but throwing a hashed queue ID into the URL (basically giving you your place in the queue)
HELD IN QUEUE FOR A FEW MINUTES
**>> 302> ** - NON-CANONICAL product page (with markup, on-page product info, optimised page title, etc.)
I can foresee two scenarios
- search engine has indexed product page prior to queue kicking in. Then queue kicks in 302ing search engine to queue page. because it's a 302 the crappy queue page content is indexed back to the originating product page. This causes search engines to drop the product page cos all the product-specific markup/content has been overwritten with crappy queue page content
- search engines don't manage to index product page before queue kicks in. They crawl product page URL, get 302 to queue page, index crappy queue page content and think the product page is crappy, so don't traffic it. They will recrawl the product page once the queue's turned off, only to discover the product has sold out - boo.
I very much doubt the search engines will 'wait for a few minutes' so may never end up reaching the product page again.
I'm trying to get the markup/product info and optimised meta data injected into the queue page, so that remains present at all points on the journey in the hope that this enables search engines to continue to rank and traffic the product page.
What's your take on this?
Any suggestions on how we might overcome the issues? (before you ask; avoiding using the queue system is impossible, sorry!)
Thanks!
-
Thanks for taking the time to answer. Agreed. It's confusing at best. It confused the heck out of me when I was deconstructing the behaviour.
We generally get indexed faster than 2-3 days. Last time I checked the average time to index was around 40 minutes. Guess that's because the engines know our content changes frequently.
_1- If the products on your site are selling within minutes, then why are you focusing your attention on how Google will index them? _Most of our purchasing customers come via Natural Search.
2- As the products sell out within minutes and after so the redirection is stopped, then why would that affect how Google ranks your site? I should have been clearer: t****he queue will trigger after a threshold is reached, not when product is sold out. But if it's a particularly high demand product, it could sell out before threshold dips below that configured for the queue.
Good suggestion about opening queue in a tab.I will explore that option.
-
To be honest, I am a bit lost in the explanation of your external redirect chain, but I would like to add:
1- If the products on your site are selling within minutes, then why are you focusing your attention on how Google will index them?
2- As the products sell out within minutes and after so the redirection is stopped, then why would that affect how Google ranks your site?
Google doesn't instantly crawl and index your page as soon as it is created. From past experience, I can say that it can take 2-3 days for Google to index new articles, and that would be more than enough time for your products to sell out and for the redirect chain to be stopped.
An alternative solution would be so that when the user first gets to the site and clicks the "purchase" button, you don't just redirect him to the queue page, but open the queue page on a new tab. That way it won't count as a redirect but simply as a link from your site to the redirect site.
Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com
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
-
Domain Level Redirects - HTTP and HTTPS
About 2 years ago (well before I started with the company), we did an http=>https migration. It was not done correctly. The http=>https redirect was never inserted into the .htaccess file. In essence, we have 2 websites. According to Google search console, we have 19,000 HTTP URLs indexed and 9,500 HTTPS URLs indexed. I've done a larger scale http=>https migration (60,000 SKUs), and our rankings dropped significantly for 6-8 weeks. We did this the right way, using sitemaps, and http and https GSC properties. Google came out recently and said that this type of rankings drop is normal for large sites. I need to set the appropriate expectations for management. Questions: How badly is the domain split affecting our rankings, if at all? Our rankings aren't bad, but I believe we are underperforming our backlink profile. Can we expect a net rankings gain when the smoke clears? There are a number of other technical SEO issues going on as well. How badly will our rankings drop (temporarily) and for how long when we add the redirect to the .htaccess file? Is there a way to mitigate the rankings impact? For example, only submitting partial sitemaps to our GSC http property? Has anyone gone through this before?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud0 -
Browser Cacheing - HTTPS redirects to HTTP
Howdy lovely Moz people. A webmaster redirected https protocol links to http a number of years ago in order to try and capture as many links as possible on a site we now manage. We have recently tried to implement https and realised that because of this existing redirect rule, they are now causing infinite loops when trying to test an http redirect. http redirecting to https redirecting back to http, etc. The https version works by itself weirdly enough. We believe that this is due to the permanent browser caching. So unless users clear their cache, they will get this infinite loop. Does anyone have any advice on how we can get round this? a) index both sites and specify in GSC that the https is the canonical version of the site and hope that Google sees that and removes the http version for the https version b) stick with http as infinite loops will kill the site c) ??????????? Thanks all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HenryFrance0 -
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 -
Do I redirect pages that no longer appear on the website?
Here is an example of the link that is no longer on the website (Broken link) http://www.weddingrings.com/item.cfm?str_shortdesc=UNIQUE The broken link was fixed to : http://www.weddingrings.com/item.cfm?str_shortdesc=UNIQUE CARRE CUT DIAMOND ETERNITY BAND&str_category=Diamond-Bands-and-Gold-Rings&grouping_id=9&category_id=21&int_item_id=6884 Would I still need to redirect the old broken link to the new fixed one using 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexkatalkin0 -
Php 301 redirect
Hi I am migrating an old wordpress site to a custom PHP site and the URL profiles will be different, so want to retain all link profiles and more importantly if a user visits the old urls via search then they are seamlessly transferred to the new equivalent page For example www.domain.com/about-us is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/aboutus.php www.domain.com/furniture is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/furniture-collections.php etc What is the best way of achieving this apart from .htaccess as not 100% confident of doing this. Could it be done via PHP or using meta tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
302 redirects in the sitemap?
My website uses a prefix at the end to instruct the back-end about visitor details. The setup is similar to this site - http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=sf with a 302 redirect from the normal link to the one with additional info and a canonical tag on the actual URL without the extra info ((the normal one here being http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com,) However, when I used www.xml-sitemaps.com to create a sitemap they did so using the URLs with the extra info on the links... what should I do to create a sitemap using the normal URLs (which are the ones I want to be promoting)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Redirecting Powerful Domains
What do you do if you have a client that never implemented a 301 redirect on their domain? For example here are the OSE stats for the URLs; http://url.com PA: 48 DA: 50 LRD: 65 TL: 1,084 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 http://www.url.com PA: 51 DA: 50 LRD: 165 TL: 2,271 FB: 178 FB: 14 T:5 G+1:3 My first instincts are to redirect the first one to the second one, but is it too late for that? Will that screw up all of their established stats? Any input or examples of past experiences with this would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0