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
-
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed. Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
301 redirects delay in picking up
Hi I have been involved in the redesign/development of a website which has up until now had a lot of international traffic. On day of migration I uploaded all the 301 redirects to the website (wordpress) using Simple 301 redirect plugin. I tested a number of them and they appeared to be working. I also submitted the new sitemaps to Search Console. Since migration international traffic - particularly from countries such as india, Phillipines, Sri Lanka etc have significantly dropped off whereas the local traffic and some of the international traffic such as USA has remained fairly consistent. Looking at Analytics and entrances recently it appears as though search results are/were showing a number of pages with 404's (one in particular which received significant traffic and for which I had created a 301 redirection) - I have checked this page using the old url and it re-directs correctly for me and today asked a colleague in India to also check - he is getting the redirection fine. Does Google.in take a significantly longer time to pick these up in search results? Or am I missing something?
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing0 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TroyW0 -
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 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?
Hi Guys After adhering to the On Page optimisation suggestions given by SEOmoz, we redirected some of old urls to new ones. We set 301 redirects from the old pages to new on a page by page basis but our search engine ranking subsequently fell off the radar and lost PR. We confirmed redirection with fiddler and it shows 301 permanent redirect on every page as expected. To manage redirection using a common code logic we executed following: In Http module, using “rewrite path” we route “all old page requests” to a page called “redirect.aspx? oldpagename =[oldpagename]”. This happens at server side. In redirect.aspx we are redirecting from old page to new page using 301 permanent redirect. In the browser, when old page is requested, it will 301 redirect to new page. In hope we and others can learn from our mistakes - what did we do wrong ?!? Thanks in advance. Dave - www.paysubsonline.com
Technical SEO | | Evo0 -
How many strong tags is too many
Hi everyone, just a quick question, what are your views on the use of strong tags in content? how many is too many? What is you have strong tags around every keywords for a sentance etc?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards1 -
301 Redirect vs Domain Alias
We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?
Technical SEO | | briankb0