Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Double 301 redirect

    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.

    Double 301 redirect

    Technical SEO
    3
    5
    7163
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • steffen_
      steffen_ last edited by

      Hi together,

      due to some technical reasons I have redirect (301) an existing link two times.

      Example:

      www.mydomain.com/root/site.html > 301 > www.mydomain.com/site.html > 301 www.mydomain.com/site_new.html

      Is there anybody how has got some experience like doing a double redirect? What about link juice?

      Best regards

      Steffen

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • RobertFisher
        RobertFisher @steffen_ last edited by

        Make sure you do the url to url wherever possible. If you don't, you won't know in a couple of weeks based on my experience. (One of the best pieces of SEO advice ever came about that very issue. When we went back in and changed each url to 301 within days we saw DA and PA go up!). 
        I look forward to hearing your progress.

        Robert

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • steffen_
          steffen_ last edited by

          Thank you for your answers. We have some important sites we'd like to keep link juice but due to technical reasons we need to do double redirection. Currenty I expect we will loose rankings because we are going to restructure the whole site. I will see it in a couple of days and come back with my experience...

          RobertFisher 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • RobertFisher
            RobertFisher last edited by

            Good question Bonprix. My most recent experience was with a law firm that had a previous site several years ago and 301'd and then hired a developer recently to build a new site. Due to change in url structure and menus, etc. it was necessary to 301 from the one they had to the new. I have no answer on link juice other than thinking it through a bit. If the first redirect was set up several years ago and the new one is recent, I do not think you will see to much of a loss assuming it is done correctly. Here are my suggestions:

            If using a CMS, do not use an extension and instead use .htaccess file. Here is tutorial suggested in Google webmaster tools: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/howto/htaccess.html

            Make sure you do a 301 for each url and not domain to domain.

            I would then go into webmaster tools and let Google know which domain you prefer from a canonical point of view. Here is the link for that: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=44231

            If you do all of this you should be able to capture as much of the link juice as possible.  I also noted recently that a client's developer had done a 301 redirect for the canonical and chose to redirect the www to the non www. The non had a PA of 1 for the homepage and the www had a PA of 27 for the homepage. If he had simply redirected it the opposite way, he would not be waiting or worrying about link juice. So check that rel=canon is there and check each domain for PA so that you have best outcome.

            Good Luck

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • kdaly100
              kdaly100 last edited by

              I wouldn't worry too much about the double redirect but how old are the pages that you are redirecting?  Are they getting a lot of traffic?

              Never seen a double re-direct before but then again I have never seen a lot of things 🙂

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • musthavemarketing

                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 | | musthavemarketing
                0
              • Cocoonfxmedia

                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 | | Cocoonfxmedia
                0
              • ptapley

                Meta descriptions and h1 tags during a 301 redirect

                My employer is shifting to a new domain and i am in the midst of doing URL mapping. I realize that many of the meta descriptions and H1 tags are different on the new pages - is this a problem ? Thank you.

                Technical SEO | | ptapley
                0
              • Emory_Peterson

                301 Redirects Relating to Your XML Sitemap

                Lets say you've got a website and it had quite a few pages that for lack of a better term were like an infomercial, 6-8 pages of slightly different topics all essentially saying the same thing.  You could all but call it spam. www.site.com/page-1 www.site.com/page-2 www.site.com/page-3 www.site.com/page-4 www.site.com/page-5 www.site.com/page-6 Now you decided to consolidate all of that information into one well written page, and while the previous pages may have been a bit spammy they did indeed have SOME juice to pass through. Your new page is: www.site.com/not-spammy-page You then 301 redirect the previous 'spammy' pages to the new page.  Now the question, do I immediately re-submit an updated xml sitemap to Google, which would NOT contain all of the old URL's, thus making me assume Google would miss the 301 redirect/seo juice.  Or do I wait a week or two, allow Google to re-crawl the site and see the existing 301's and once they've taken notice of the changes submit an updated sitemap? Probably a stupid question I understand, but I want to ensure I'm following the best practices given the situation, thanks guys and girls!

                Technical SEO | | Emory_Peterson
                0
              • Silviu

                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"
                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.

                Technical SEO | | Silviu
                0
              • twotd

                301 redirect not working

                Hi there! I have recently moved a domain that has been indexed by google and setup redirects so that it forwards to the new domain. It seems like the only redirect that actually is working is the canonical and main domain but every other page and or page nested within a folder are not working. Here is an example of some of the redirects. Am I doing this wrong? It seems to be going to the new domain but can't find the actual pages.... RewriteEngine On
                RewriteBase /
                RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !agoodsweep.com$ [NC]
                RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://agoodsweep.com/$1 [L,R=301]
                redirect 301 woodstoveservicerepair.html http://agoodsweep.com/woodstoveservicerepair/
                redirect 301 /westchesterchimney.html http://agoodsweep.com/west-chester-chimney/ Thanks in advance for any help!!

                Technical SEO | | twotd
                0
              • koamit

                What should be use 301 or 302 redirection for 404 pages

                Please suggest which redirection we should use for 404 pages- 301 or 302. If you can elaborate it with reason then it will be highly appreciated.

                Technical SEO | | koamit
                0
              • Gmorgan

                301 redirects & merging two sites into one

                We have a client that has two sites that rank well for different searches in their market. The main pages ranking are things like advice articles and news pieces. For various reasons, they just want one site. I believe they need to duplicate the content from the outgoing site and place it on the main site, with a 301 redirect from each old page to each new one. What happens when they eventually want to redirect the entire domain? Would these smaller, internal redirects become obsolete, therefore removing any link value they once had? I am not sure how this works or if there is a best practice way to do this. Thanks Gareth

                Technical SEO | | Gmorgan
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.