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
-
Robots txt. in page with 301 redirect
We currently have a a series of help pages that we would like to disallow from our robots txt. The thing is that these help pages are located in our old website, which now has a 301 redirect to current site. Which is the proper way to go around? 1- Add the pages we want to disallow to the robots.txt of the new website? 2- Break the redirect momentarily and add the pages to the robots.txt of the old one? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
301 redirect: canonical or non canonical?
Hi, Newbie alert! I need to set up 301 redirects for changed URLs on a database driven site that is to be redeveloped shortly. The current site uses canonical header tags. The new site will also use canonical tags. Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new? Given that the purpose of canonicals is to indicate our preferred URL, then my guess is that's what I should use. However, how can I be sure that Google (for example) has indexed the canonical in every case? Thx in anticipation.
Technical SEO | | ztalk1120 -
Updating inbound links vs. 301 redirecting the page they link to
Hi everyone, I'm preparing myself for a website redesign and finding conflicting information about inbound links and 301 redirects. If I have a URL (we'll say website.com/website) that is linked to by outside sources, should I get those outside sources to update their links when I change the URL to website.com/webpage? Or is it just as effective from a link juice perspective to simply 301 redirect the old page to the new page? Are there any other implications to this choice that I may want to consider? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Liggins0 -
Best Practice on 301 Redirect - Images
We have two sites that sell the same products. We have decided to retire one of the sites as we'd like to focus on one property. I know best practice is to redirect apples to apples, which in our case is easily done since the sites sold the same thing. www.SiteABC.com/ProductA can be redirected to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA. My question is how far does that thinking go regarding images? Each product has a main product page, of course, and then up to 6 images in some cases. Is it necessary to redirect www.SiteABC.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg? Or can they all be redirected to just the product page?
Technical SEO | | Natitude0 -
301 redirect from Blogger
Hello, I have a client with a Wordpress network of blogs, each blog is owned by a different blogger. Many of them were migrated time ago from Blogger. I have seen that the way used to redirect them is a meta refresh, so no authority is being passed. I cannot find any reliable way of making a 301 from Blogger, There are some plugins, but I'm afraid of using them. Any of you have experience with this situation please? I have even thought about placing a global rel canonical before the meta refresh, but I think that here the problem is the meta refresh itself.... Thank you in advance
Technical SEO | | Juandbbam0 -
How do I fix a 301 Redirect Loop?
Saturday I waas doing some correcting of some duplicate titles, including nofollowing tags, etc. (my main problem was duplicate titles due to tags and categories being indexed). Now this morning I see that one of my pages refuses to load, citing a 301 redirect loop. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/feeding/switching-baby-formula/ Originally, the page was posted under the wrong category. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/uncategorized/switching-baby-formula I resaved it under the correct category (feeding) and now it won't load. Can someone help me figure out how to correct this mess? Thanks so much Heather
Technical SEO | | Gotmoxie0 -
How to create a delayed 301 redirect that still passes juice?
My company is merging one of our sites into another site. At first I was just going to create a 301 redirect from domainA.com to domainB.com but we decided that would be too confusing for customers expecting to see domainA.com so we want to create a page that says something like "We've moved. please visit domainB.com or be redirected after 10 seconds". My question is, how do I create a redirect that has a delay and will this still pass the same amount of juice that a regular 301 redirect would? I've heard that meta refreshes are considered spammy by Google.
Technical SEO | | bewoldt0 -
301 Redirect with an Exact Domain name Match
My Client had a site that ranked for a pretty competitive two word phrase, but for a variety of reasons had to transfer the site to a different domain name (with none of the previous keywords). We've 301'd everything just fine to the new site, but our traffic for that two word phrase, as well as related long tail traffic, is beginning to drop. Could the drop be related to something that we didn't do well in the transfer? Or is it due to the new domain name now not being an exact match? Sitenote question: Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine. Is there any reason to switch GA to the new domain? What are the pros/cons? Much thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | TrevorMcKendrick0