Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to safely reduce the number of 301 redirects / should we be adding so many?
-
Hi All,
We lost a lot of good rankings over the weekend with no obvious cause. Our top keyword went from p3 to p12, for example.
Site speed is pretty bad (slower than 92% of sites!) but it has always been pretty bad. I'm on to the dev team to try and crunch this (beyond image optimisation) but I know that something I can effect is the number of 301 redirects we have in place.
We have hundreds of 301s because we've been, perhaps incorrectly, adding one every time we find a new crawl error in GWT and it isn't because of a broken link on our site or on an external site where we can't track down the webmaster to fix the link. Is this bad practice, and should we just ignore 404s caused by external broken URLs?
If we wanted to reduce these numbers, should we think about removing ones that are only in place due to external broken URLs?
Any other tips for safely reducing the number of 301s?
Thanks, all!
Chris
-
Really helpful. Thanks very much, Sha. Much appreciated!
-
Hi again Chris,
OK, well that makes it interesting!
First, if the list of 301's in your .htaccess file numbers in the hundreds, then there is definitely cause for concern about the effect it might be having on your load times.
The .htaccess file is read from top to bottom until a rule is matched. The first one that is matched will be used and no rule after that will be checked. Obviously, if there are hundreds of rules to check, this can cause processing bottlenecks.
Now there are some things you might be able to do to alleviate the problem IF you have the right conditions.
-
If your rebuild involved the relocation of an entire directory or directories which still contain the same pages as before, you can write a 301 Redirect for all pages in a directory with a single line of code
-
If there is a database behind your site and you have some means of matching pages from the old URL to the new (for example, is there a unique product ID for each page?) then you can use database lookups to write the redirects on the fly. This will eliminate the processing bottlenecks, but can only work if you have a reliable means of matching the pages.
-
If you have only one competition or offer at a time, then you could use database lookups to match any page with say, "competition" in the URL and 301 it to the current competition page (and the same with "offer").
-
For unknown links from external sites you can use a "catch-all" 301 to catch any other page that returns a 404 and send it to a single page (you put this rule at the very end of your .htaccess so it is the last to be matched). You could send these all to home, a generally relevant landing or category page, or a specially designed 404 page. The most important thing is that the page you redirect them to is as relevant as possible, or provides options that may keep the visitor on your site (search, menus etc). I prefer not to send these "random" 404's to home as they are likely to bring an increase in bounce rate. Since bounce is now acknowledged as a ranking factor, I prefer to keep any traffic with a higher probability of bouncing away from pages with the highest Page Authority (PA).
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
-
Yeah, that seems to be the consensus - thanks, Aaron!
Back to the drawing board diagnosing this drop - avg rank over our top 200 keywords has gone from 80-something to 120-something. Not good at all!
Chris
-
Hi Sha,
A combination of things, really. We rebuilt and got rid of a load of legacy pages so there's a few for that reason. We also have a lot of time-limited pages like competitions and special offers that require specific landing pages. The majority are caused by broken links on external sites though - links that never existed, or that have been crawled and added to an autogenerated page incorrectly. The usual nonsense.
So, in brief, there isn't really one cause!
Many thanks for your reply.
Chris
-
In general, 301 aren't bad unless you have a whole string of them. For instance if a 301 redirected to another 301, then another, etc... If 301's are shallow they usually do not present a problem.
-
Hi BaseKit,
What is the reason for there being so many 404's?
Did you move your site or rebuild your site structure? Do you have a lot of pages that are removed after a short time?
The answer to these questions will help to know what is the best approach for your situation.
Sha
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
-
Unsolved Temporary redirect from 302 to 301 for PNG File?
#302HTTP #temporaryredirect
Technical SEO | | Damian_Ed 0
Hi everyone, Recently I have faced a crawl issue with my media images on website. For example this page url https://intreface.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Horion-screen-side-2.png has 302 HTTP Status and the recommendation is to change it 301. I have read the article on temporary redirections here:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection?_ga=2.45324708.1293586627.1702571936-916254120.1702571936
but its not written here how to redirect in my HTML 1 image url not the landing page.
Screenshot 2023-12-15 at 11.02.40.png
I have messaged to MOZ Support but they recommended to go for the MOZ Community!
Screenshot 2023-12-15 at 11.06.02.png Could you assist me wit this issue please? I can reach HTTML of the necessary page and change what I need for permanent redirection but firstly I need to understand how to do that correctly.0 -
301 redirect from dynamic url to static page
Hi, i want to redirect from this old link http://www.g-store.gr/product_info.php?products_id=1735/ to this one https://www.g-store.gr/golf-toualetas.html I have done several attempts but with no result. I anyone can help i will appreciate. My website runs in an Apache server with cpanel. Thank you
Technical SEO | | alstam0 -
301 Redirect non existant pages
Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Sudden jump in the number of 302 redirects on my Squarespace Site
My Squarespace site www.thephysiocompany.com has seen a sudden jump in 302 redirects in the past 30 days. Gone from 0-302 (ironically). They are not detectable using generic link redirect testing sites and Squarespace have not explanation. Any help would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Jcoley0 -
301 redirect relative or absolute path?
Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
Technical SEO | | Silviu
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
S.0 -
Creating a CSV file for uploading 301 redirect URL map
Hi if i'm bulk uploading 301 redirects whats needed to create a csv file? is it just a case of creating an excel spreadsheet & have the old urls in column A and new urls in column B and then just convert to csv and upload ? or do i need to put in other details or paremeters etc etc ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?
Hi, please someone help! We have two identical websites, say A & B. Because of the not so good SEO establishment, site B was built and site A was 301 redirected to site B weeks ago. For some reasons, we have to reuse site A, which means we have to cancel the 301 redirection. (Sound a little crazy) So the question are: 1. Can we conduct the action? 2. If we cant, what's the reason? 3. If we can, what would be the best practice? Thanks for help in advance! Plus: we also CARE what would happen to site B if the 301 is cancelled? Will it grow healthy like a new site?
Technical SEO | | Squall3150 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | | dballari0