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
-
Backlinks that go to a redirected URL
Hey guys, just wondering, my client has 3 websites, 2 of 3 will be closed down and the domains will be permanently redirected to the 1 primary domain - however they have some high quality backlinks pointing the domains that will be redirected. How does this effective SEO? Domain One (primary - getting redesign and rebuilt) - not many backlinks
Technical SEO | | thinkLukeSEO
Domain Two (will redirect to Domain One) - has quality backlinks
Domain Three (will redirect to Domain One) - has quality backlinks When the new website is launched on Domain One I will contact the backlink providers and request they update their URL - i assume that would be the best.0 -
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 -
How do I redirect the Author archive page in Wordpress?
If you do a search for my name on Google, the first result is the author archive page of my Wordpress blog. I would like to redirect the author page to my "about me" page but cannot add a 301 as the author page is created dynamically in Wordpress. Anyone know how I can do this?
Technical SEO | | richdan0 -
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 -
What to do with 302 redirects being indexed
Hi there, Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor. For example: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/ In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL; en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/ (there is no content here, and never has been). This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links. Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting. Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable. But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index? Is the canonical tag the best way? I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | etruvian0 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | | dballari0 -
Double 301 redirect
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
Technical SEO | | steffen_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