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.
301 Redirect in breadcrumb. How bad is it?
-
Hi all,
How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects?
We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb.
SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404.
However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months. could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.
-
That sounds like you could have a soft redirect issue of some kind. If the 'actual' redirects 'strip' the trailing slash, but the then non-trailing slash URLs canonical back to the trailing slash versions (which again redirect to remove the slash) then that's known as a soft redirect loop and yes it can adversely affect SEO performance
So let's have a look, using this URL as an example:
https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/camping-tents-other-brands
Status Code (200 OK) - but canonical tag is like:
So when you visit that URL with the trailing slash... It does NOT 301 to remove the slash, so no you are not caught in a soft redirect loop and that is not the issue. However, be that as it may, having ALL the hyperlinks point to 'non-/' and then all the canonicals point to 'trailling-/', could be very confusing for Google. Does it go with the canonical URL, or the URL with the most links which is also a signal of, what page is legit?
I would still get it seen to
-
Thanks for this useful info. I've done some more digging however, I may have just stumbled across what could be the issue in the slow paced decline month on month...?
So back when we started to gradually loose SEO ground we were actually changing URL structure from
fishingtackleshop.com.au/categories/fishing-tackle to fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing-tackle (we removed the /categories part of the URL so link juice wasn't being passed onto that benign sub-directory "categories").
However, in a Screeming Frog Crawl today what i noticed but haven't picked up on before since i was only looking for 404 and 301 issues, is it seems we are actually having canonical issues.
SO,
/fishing-tackle is not indexed in google since it is canonicalised to /fishing-tackle/ (trailing slash).. Why i don't know perhaps as developer has listed trailing slash link in the menu.
but /fishing-tackle/ is also not indexed when i just did a google search.
So, I am guessing i may have found my issue? (or a big part of it)!
-
Past performance is seldom a good indicator of future success. The web is so competitive now that 'good unique content' isn't really good enough any more (anyone can make it)
This video from Rand is a good illustration: https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday - where you say "content is original and not bad" - maybe that's not enough any more
One solution is the 10x content initiative: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday
And your site should have a unique value-proposition for end users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AmRg3p79pM (just wait for Miley to stop outlining issue #1 then stop watching)
It's possible your tech issue is a contributing factor but I'd say search engine advancements and changing standards are likely to be affecting you more
Even if you do have a strong legacy, that's not a 'meal ticket' to rank well forever. SEO is a competitive environment
Sometimes tech issues (like people accidentally no-indexing their whole site or blocking GoogleBot) can be responsible for massive drops. But these days it's usually more a comment on what Google thinks is good / bad
-
Thanks for your feedback
To confirm they were not an old parent category that we set as not visable. It was purely new category set to non-visable in bigcommerec for design purpose due limitations.
I'll explain. here is one page
https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing-lures
You will note we have shop by category at the top.. but further below we have shop by species... for design purpose we had to create the parent category and set to not visable as "shop by species" and put in a heap of Visable child categories under that. IE barra lures, bass lures etc.
However, the problem lied as in breadcrumbs even though we set category "shop by species" as not visible the link still showed in breadcrumbs. so we 301 redirected it back to the prior head parent category /fishing-lures (effectively in the breadcrumb trail there was then 2 links to /fishing-lures
Long story short /fishing-lures-shop-by-species (the non visable catery) was a brand new category created for our design purpose of our live page https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing-lures due to bigcommerce limitations. It was never an active old page...
today i have removed the 301 and i will just create a landing page. but over the past few days we have taken a further tank in our rankings and i cant understand why other than this theory. content is original and not bad, established site since 2005, used to rank #1 for just about any keyword, previously targeted by negative SEO but Disavow file is updated once a month via SEMRUSH monitoring.
If you or anyone else have any further ideas for me to look at as for possible issues do share :).
Thanks again for taking the time to give your initial imput.
-
Highly doubt that would be a reason to 'lose of lot of SEO ground'. If those URLs were 404-ing before, you had breadcrumb links to 404s and that's worse than breadcrumb links to 301s
The bigger problem was, you lost your category pages which got set to not visible. And by the way, even when you change them back to 'visible', if the 301 is still in effect - users and search engines still won't be able to access your category URLs (as they will be redirected instead!)
If the category pages have been restored and you're still redirecting them, yes that is a big problem. But it's not because you used a 301 in a link, it's because you took away your category URLs. That very well could impact performance (IMO)
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
-
Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?
Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 3, 2021, 3:22 AM | gaiaslastlaugh0 -
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 24, 2019, 11:18 AM | Kahuna_Charles1 -
If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance?
Hi, If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 7, 2017, 5:49 AM | kadut1 -
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 23, 2017, 12:19 PM | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Images Returning 404 Error Codes. 301 Redirects?
We're working with a site that has gone through a lot of changes over the years - ownership, complete site redesigns, different platforms, etc. - and we are finding that there are both a lot of pages and individual images that are returning 404 error codes in the Moz crawls. We're doing 301 redirects for the pages, but what would the best course of action be for the images? The images obviously don't exist on the site anymore and are therefore returning the 404 error codes. Should we do a 301 redirect to another similar image that is on the site now or redirect the images to an actual page? Or is there another solution that I'm not considering (besides doing nothing)? We'll go through the site to make sure that there aren't any pages within the site that are still linking to those images, which is probably where the 404 errors are coming from. Based on feedback below it sounds like once we do that, leaving them alone is a good option.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 8, 2014, 7:00 PM | garrettkite0 -
Should I redirect my xml sitemap?
Hi Mozzers, We have recently rebranded with a new company name, and of course this necessitated us to relaunch our entire website onto a new domain. I watched the Moz video on how they changed domain, copying what they did pretty much to the letter. (Thank you, Moz for sharing this with the community!) It has gone incredibly smoothly. I told all my bosses that we may see a 40% reduction in traffic / conversions in the short term. In the event (and its still very early days) we have in fact seen a 15% increase in traffic and our new website is converting better than before so an all-round success! I was just wondering if you thought I should redirect my XML sitemap as well? So far I haven't, but despite us doing the change of address thing in webmaster tools, I can see Google processed the old sitemap xml after we did the change of address etc. What do you think? I know we've been very lucky with the outcome of this rebrand but I don't want to rest on my laurels or get tripped up later down the line. Thanks everyone! Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 11, 2014, 1:01 PM | CommT0 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 18, 2013, 9:59 PM | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0 -
How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?
Hi All, In order to avoid duplication errors we've decided to redirect old categories (merge some categories).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 10, 2013, 9:45 AM | BeytzNet
In the past we have been very generous with the number of categories we assigned each post. One category needs to be redirected back to blog home (removed completely) while a couple others should be merged. Afterwords we will re-categorize some of the old posts. What is the proper way to do so?
We are not technical, Is there a plugin that can assist? Thanks0