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    4. 301 redirect hops from non-https and www

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    301 redirect hops from non-https and www

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • dsbud
      dsbud last edited by

      It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop.

      It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain.

      The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not

      In which case, you could have:

      1. Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar
      2. 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page.

      Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.

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

        Maybe I'm missing something? You can implement an htaccess rewrite rule (or equivalent for your server stack) using regex/host so that essentially
        http://example.com/foo OR https://example.com/foo redirect to https://example.com/bar That's the standard approach and serves in one hop. Is there something I'm missing why you're getting into a load balancer etc to accomplish this?

        P.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • GastonRiera
          Gaston Riera last edited by

          Hello there,

          I´d suggest you to go for the Option 1: two hops.
          Google understands well up to 4-5 hops. Matt Cutts said it in these videos:
          Can too many redirects from a single URL have a negative effect on crawling? Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site?

          Also, I think that setting a 301 to a 404, it would give to GoogleBot mixed signals and there could be some cases where you get some links to that 301->404 page and lost that ones.

          Best luck!
          GR.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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