301 redirects

[xinar]

I am in the process of truncating many of the URLs using a plugin installed on Wordpress.

The question is does google penalize or have issues with too many 301 redirects on your site. I have many many products I want to do this with.   I thought I read somewhere that 301 redirects should be held to a minimum.

Would appreciate any assistance

[xinar]

Thank you

You answer clears that up for me

don

[seoelevated]

From my experience, there is not an issue with too many redirects in parallel. However, too many redirects in sequence, or a "redirect chain" definitely is problematic. If a page redirects too many times, the search engine might not follow until the very end.

With regard to redirects in general. On occasion, Google has stated that some small amount rank equity is lost with each redirect. So, we do tend to assume that a direct link is preferred over a redirected link. When we restructure our URLs, we generally clean up all the internal linking to point directly at the new links, rather than rely on redirects. With internal links, that's feasible. With external links, while you can reach out and request link updates, you do also need to rely on redirects.