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
-
Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect
I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings1 -
Which automatic redirects to use in International SEO
Hi, I need help with international SEO redirects. I'm going to have intelligencebank.com/au for Australian visitors and intelligencebank.com for the rest of the world. I would like to automatically redirect aus users that land on .com to .com/au and vice versa for non-australian users. 1. Which automatic redirects should I use: a) java script because it will allow US based google bots to crawl my /au website (bots won't read javascript so they won't be redirected) b) http redirects c) 301 redirects d) 302 redirects e) anything else? a) Should I still use rel alternate even though I only use english? b) if I should add rel alternate, can I still keep my existing rel canonical tags that are use to avoid duplicate content (I use a lot of utm codes when advertising)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intelligencebank0 -
Url rewrite & 301 redirects
Hi all I am having some issues rearding url rewrites and 301 redirects with 1 and 1 hosting and am unsure of the best approach. The website is a custom made shopping cart system with categories and products. The current urls for categories are : index.php?l=product_list&c=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands The current urls for products are : index.php?l=product_detail&c=1&p=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands/banner-stand Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vividwebdesign0 -
Should you cache redirects?
I would like to know what fellow SEO people think, should you cache a redirect? Problems I see with caching redirects are meta refreshes and there might be a slow down in page load, but is it a big issue? Should we cache redirects? Do pages get indexed more if you cache redirects? Our ecommerce product pages are all dynamic, and currently we cache redirects but i'm seeing a lot of meta refresh issues. Another area that cropped up is that, the redirect doesn't pass on query parameters. Our system dumps URLs and they are redirected to SEO ones, but the redirect doesn't pass on parameters like Google Analytic tracking tags. What are your thoughts? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Should I start new domain and redirect site?
I recently my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) drop off a cliff. Google tells me there's no manual penalty therefore it might be algorithmic. I don't know why my rankings went but I think it could be that I added A LOT of category pages pulling the same content from posts and this could have caused both duplicate content issues and too many on page links causing an algo penalty. Ive deleted the categories and therefore fixed duplicate content issue (perhaps you guys could check out the site and see that you agree with me) but rankings have not improved even thougo most of the pages have been recrawled. I read somewhere its extremely hard to recover from such a penalty so should I move my site to a and domain and redirect all urls? I can't think of another solution. Any help appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Explaining 301 redirects instead of 302
I am trying to explain in layman's terms to a client why using 302 for their redirects (which they have done themselves) is not right. There view is they do not seem to listen or believe what is being said to them and do not want to do permanent damage to the old domain so are using 302 redirects. I have explained over and over 301 is needed but I do not seem to be good at communicating this. Can someone give me a good example or description I can use to get my point across?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
New to SEO. How do I set up a 301 Redirect? What Else should I do?
Hello, I am new to web design. I designed my own site using dreamweaver and did all my seo on my own, I read a few books. Long story short I rank on the bottom of page 1 just after 3 months and the keywords are highly competitive. Now, I am up against some heavy hitters from national brands versus my local real estate site. I don't have a 301 redirect, and am not sure what else I should be doing to get my site ranked higher. I have back links from various sites, ( non-paid ) so it's what others call white hat. When I grade my site on website grader I get a great score versus the sites that are higher than me. I'm guessing my sites age is an issue. I guess I'm looking for some guidance. Thank you all, Here is my site to view. http://www.bronxpad.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Keyword-Rich Domains - Redirect?
Hi, Mozzers- I have a client that has a bunch of pretty nice keyword-rich domain names. Their traffic and rankings are good. They provide legal services in the Chicago area. I have lots of good content that I could use to start a blog using a domain like keyword,keyword-blog.com. Good idea? Currently I have a resources area on their website but feel like this area could be getting a little bloated and some news-related stuff isn't really appropriate. 2 Questions: Should I use one of the decent domains for a blog and build up the rankings, traffic, and link to the main site? Or is this lots of work for little payout? Both sites would be hosted in the cloud. Some of the domain names are related to their name, others are keyword or geo-targeted. Would it be wise to setup 301 redirects going to their website? Pros/cons? If you need additional info, please PM me for details. Thank you, friends! LHC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhc670