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 do you fix redirect chains and temporary redirects?
-
Hi,
I have a lot of issues popping up with temporary redirects and redirect chains. I'm still confused as to what exactly redirect chains are and I don't know how to find where the "chains" are or how to fix them. I'm having two issues mainly:1. Temporary RedirectsI have around 100 pages on our www.twowayradiosfor.com website that are being flagged as temporary redirects. All of them have one thing in common: they are review pages (basically, when a customer clicks on the Review button to review a certain product, they are redirected to a review page for that product).URL Example: https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/reviewhelpful.asp?ProductCode=CLS1410-COMBO&ID=44&yes=noI went into our website and set any URL containing the following as noindex:/review.aspWill that fix the issue? If yes, will I also need to do that for any URL containing /reviewhelpful.asp?2. Redirect ChainsIt seems like basically every product page on my website has this issue (over 100 pages). Here's an example of one:https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/Motorola-CLS1110-p/cls1110.htmI don't see any broken links on this page or links that redirect to another page that redirects, etc. What is causing this? Is it something on my header bar that is redirecting (since that header bar appears on every page, maybe that is why this issue shows up on a lot of pages)?I am new to Moz and still trying to figure this stuff out. I really appreciate any help.
Thanks,
Sawyer
-
Thank you again, Alex. Moz has tagged a bunch of these pages as "temporary redirects" so I have them all as "disallow" right now. I'm hoping that will fix the issue. I'm not sure why Moz is flagging them as temporary redirects. They are just review pages of my products, which I guess are generated when a customer clicks the Leave a Review button and then gets taken to these review pages.
-
I might not have understood your question, so apologies in advance if that's the case.
Your redirects won't be temporary, they'll be permanent (301). As far as the search engines (and anyone else) are concerned, the location has moved permanently.
You can't really set a redirect (temporary or permanent) as nofollow. The redirect is a response code from the server, it's not a link. To be fair, you wouldn't want to set it to nofollow even if you could, you want the search engines to follow the redirection to the new place and index that.
-
Hi Alex,
One more question for you. This is my understanding of the noindex, nofollow, etc. tags:
A ‘noindex’ tag tells search engines not to include the page in search results.Disallowing a page means you’re telling search engines not to crawl it.Nofollow: tells them not to follow the links on your page.So the best bet for these temporary redirects is to make them nofollow instead of just disallowing them?
Thanks,
Sawyer -
Alex, thank you for taking the time to write such a thorough and helpful response. I really appreciate it.
I will talk with my host, Volusion, about changing the noindex to nofollow.
It makes sense that I have issues with links being HTTP. I migrated my website over to Volusion from a really old platform and the website was originally created back in 2008, so I'm guessing we never fully migrated it over properly. I'm going to see if there's a way to find all of those http links and change them to https at one time, like you suggested.
Hopefully Volusion can help me properly configure the website, which should fix the Homepage and the AddThis feature and then I can use a tool to fix all of the other links.
Again, I really appreciate your help. Have a great day!
Sawyer
-
Great answer Alex!
I'm not too familiar with ASP and the CMS which powers your website but if it is a case of hardcoded reference, it's definitely worth asking a developer if they can run "a bulk find and replace."
As Alex says, using relative links is preferred these days but a quick but if your developer doesn't feel up to it or doesn't want to dabble in too much regex, what I said should be a quick and dirty solution.
Good luck!
Nick
-
1. Ideally, you want to set those "Review" links to nofollow, rather than the pages they link to noindex.
2. From a quick look, the problem seems to be that lots of your links are pointing to http, rather than https, which means the link gets followed and then your site redirects the client to the https version.
For example, in your breadcrumbs, you link to the homepage but at http. I would suggest using relative links to avoid this i.e "/"
Also, I assume your product descriptions were written before you moved to https, so any links in those are http too. (https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/Motorola-RMU2080D-p/rmu2080d.htm has a link at the bottom about a discontinued product that links to a http page). I would suggest using a find and replace tool to find any reference to http://www.twowayradiosfor.com/ and replace it with https://www.twowayradiosfor.comAlso, unlikely to be causing any issues, but the AddThis tool links are HTTP too, they don't get followed when you actually click them, but that would suggest to me that your site settings are still configured to HTTP rather than https. Perhaps Site Address (URL) is wrongly configured? (That would also explain the Home breadcrumb being wrong)
As an aside, I'd seriously consider dropping the www. given the already long url. It will make your SERPs a little better in my opinion.
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
-
Cant find source of redirect
Hey guys, I have a bizarre situation on my hands. I have a URL that is being wonky. The url is redirecting to another url and the 301 redirect is not in my htaccess. There is a 301 redirect in my htaccess but is being overwritten by something else, i.e. whatever is happening in above. So basically URL A should be redirecting to URL B but instead its going to URL C. I know we were not hacked, it's not redirecting to a strange bizarre domain. I have also disabled all of our plugins that redirect (to my knowledge) Any thoughts would be great!
Technical SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Intermittent 404 - What causes them and how to fix?
Hi! I'm working on a client site at the moment and I've discovered a couple of pages that are 404ing but producing a 200 OK response. However, I have checked these URLs again and some are now producing a 404 Error response. No changes have been made (that I'm aware of) so it appears that the URLs are returning both 200 OK and 404 Error responses intermittently. Any ideas what could cause this and the best solution? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | daniel-brooks0 -
How to find temporary redirects of existing site you don't control?
I am getting ready to move a clients site from another company. They have like 35 tempory redirects according to MOZ. Question is, how can I find out then current redirects so I can update everything for the new site? Do I need access to the current htaccess file to do this?
Technical SEO | | scott3150 -
Redirect URLS with 301 twice
Hello, I had asked my client to ask her web developer to move to a more simplified URL structure. There was a folder called "home" after the root which served no purpose. I asked for the URLs to be redirected using 301 to the new URLs which did not have this structure. However, the web developer didn't agree and decided to just rename the "home" folder "p". I don't know why he did this. We argued the case and he then created the URL structure we wanted. Initially he had 301 redirected the old URLS (the one with "Home") to his new version (the one with the "p"). When we asked for the more simplified URL after arguing, he just redirected all the "p" URLS to the PAGE NOT FOUND. However, remember, all the original URLs are now being redirected to the PAGE NOT FOUND as a result. The problems I see are these unless he redirects again: The new simplified URLS have to start from scratch to rank 2)We have duplicated content - two URLs with the same content Customers clicking products in the SERPs will currently find that they are being redirect to the 404 page. I understand that redirection has to occur but my questions are these: Is it ok to redirect twice with 301 - so old URL to the "p" version then to final simplified version. Will link juice be lost doing this twice? If he redirects from the original URLS to the final version missing out the "p" version, what should happen to the "p" version - they are currently indexed. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
How to fix keyword cannibalization?
Hello All, I am a webmaster of http://www.bannerbuzz.com and I have some problem in keyword cannibalization in my store, i have lots of categories related to banners, and in Banner section my my keyword is vinyl banners and my all categories urls structure connected with vinyl banners, I am definitely sure that keyword cannibalization issue in my website and i want to resolve it as soon as possible, so can anyone please help me how can i resolve this issue with effective way or without affected my keyword ranking? My Keywords Vinyl Banners : http://www.bannerbuzz.com/full-color-vinyl-banners.html
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
Custom Banners : http://www.bannerbuzz.com/custom-vinyl-banners.html
Outdoor Banners : http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor-vinyl-banners.html My 1 keyword vinyl banners is affected, so can anyone please look at these pages and let me know how can i resolve keyword cannibalization from my website.? Thanks
BannerBuzz.com0 -
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 the h1 tag?
No More Than One H1 Tag Easy fix <dl> <dt>Number of H1s</dt> <dd>2</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Best practices for both SEO and accessibility require only a single H1 tag. The H1 is meant to be the page's headline, and thus, multiple H1s are confusing. Consider employing H2, H3 or CSS styles to achieve the same results with text visualization.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Remove multiple instances of the H1 tag, so that only one exists on the page.</dd> <dd>I get this error yet it does not tell me how to fix it. I'm not even sure what the H1 tag is?
Technical SEO | | 678648631264
</dd> </dl>0 -
Someone is redirecting their url to mine
Hello, I have just discovered that a company in Poland www.realpilot.pl is directing their domain to ours www.transair.co.uk. We have not authorised this, neither do we want this. I have contacted the company and the webmaster to get it removed. If you search for the domain name www.realpilot.pl we (www.transair.co.uk) come up top. My biggest worry is that we will get penalised by Google for this re-direct as it appears to be done using some kind of frame. Does anyone know anything about this kind of thing? Many Thanks Rob Martin
Technical SEO | | brightonseorob0