I have over 12,000 permanent redirects. Is this okay?
-
Hey guys,
I have moved my website to http://www to https:/www. I use a plugin called Really Simple SSL on Wordpress.
Now I have 12,000 permanent 301 redirects. It seems like my whole site has been moved. Is this the right way to do it?
I am quite new to SEO and I quite don't understand if this is good or bad. From my intuition, it seems like a lot of redirects for Google bot to crawl through. Is there a better way to move to HTTPS without all these redirects?
Thank you.
Paul
-
Thanks Ryan. Very helpful advice. I restored to my backup and asked my web host to redirect to HTTPS. No more 12,000 redirects!
-
Great question. For a move to HTTPS and no other URL syntax changes, you should be able to put a single regular expression redirect in place at the server level rather than a 1 to 1 redirect for every URL to simply change to the secure protocol. Depending on your domain and site hosting provider, that could be done in either of their dashboards.
The downside of having so many redirects will slow page load load and ultimately impact your SEO at some point as each time a page is loaded, the redirects list must be scanned prior to serving the page. Redirects are a necessary function but keeping them organized and optimized is key.
I’m happy to continue the conversation if you need any help. WordPress is a great CMS and there are many ways to work through this.
-
A redirect is a way to send both users and search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested. The three most commonly used redirects are 301, 302, and Meta Refresh.
To understand all the concepts, I advise you to refer to the Moz article. It's helpful and also written in easy language. The author has illustrated all the things in detail with media files & examples.
For the detailed information: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
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
-
301 redirects and impact on page authority
I need to restructure a section of my website, changing some page titles and moving some pages to other sections. This will then change the URLs but the CMS I use will automatically create 301 redirects so the old URLs still work. The question is, will this have any negative impacts on page authority/page rank? From what I've read, it seems having 301's used to have a negative impact but doesn't anymore?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ciehmoz0 -
Googlebot being redirected but not users?
Hi, We seem to have a slightly odd issue. We noticed that a number of our location category pages were slipping off 1 page, and onto page 2 in our niche. On inspection, we noticed that our Arizona page had started ranking in place of a number of other location pages - Cali, Idaho, NJ etc. Weirdly, the pages they had replaced were no longer indexed, and would remain so, despite being fetched, tweeted etc. One test was to see when the dropped out pages had been last crawled, or at least cached. When conducting the 'cache:domain.com/category/location' on these pages, we were getting 301 redirected to, you guessed it, the Arizona page. Very odd. However, the dropped out pages were serving 200 OK when run through header checker tools, screaming frog etc. On the face of it, it would seem Googlebot is getting redirected when it is hitting a number of our key location pages, but users are not. Has anyone experienced anything like this? The theming of the pages are quite different in terms of content, meta etc. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers0 -
Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
Hello, Simple question - Should we be redirecting our HTTP pages to HTTPS? If yes, why, if not, why? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
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 -
301 redirect with /? in URL
For a Wordpress site that has the ending / in the URL with a ? after it... how can you do a 301 redirect to strip off anything after the / For example how to take this URL domain.com/article-name/?utm_source=feedburner and 301 to this URL domain.com/article-name/ Thank you for the help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
Temporary Redirects on Magento
I've recently taken over a client who uses the Magento platform and there was definitely a duplicate issue with his homepage. It redirected www to non www, however the canonical tag was setup wrong and pointing to the www version. When I looked at OSE for both versions the non www has only 7 linking domains and a page authority of 32. The www version has 24 linking domains and page authority of 39. As the domain is fairly new, I decided to redirect the non www to www and keep the canonical the same. (I changed the internal linking structure etc). When I run both URLs through this tool: http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-... it's returning a whole bunch of 302, rather than 301 redirects. What's the deal with that? Is that a Magento setting that I can fix or something a little harder? I'm not sure if it's proper etiquette to post the URL of a client, so if that would help and is OK, please let me know. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bradkrussell1 -
What happens with a 301 redirected page?
Hi All, What happens with an indexed page that I 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Is it removed from the Google index after a while? Thanks0