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
-
batch 301 redirects with an external tool
Hi, I am migrating my e-commerce to another platform of a internet company in Brazil (Tray) that has no way to redirect 301 urls in batch, I also do not have access to files and ftp of it. Anyway, as I have hundreds of urls, I would like to know if there is any way to do batch redirects with an external platform tool? Thank you very much in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | didi090 -
Redirecting traffic to https
Hey! i was wondering, should i force all traffic to https address? i know that overall a better secured website will rank better since it earns more trust from users which means less bounce rate and the list of benefits is endless..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharonEKG
but should i FORCE ALL traffic to a https? or maybe only force a http to https? or not at all?2 -
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
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 | | garrettkite0 -
Php 301 redirect
Hi I am migrating an old wordpress site to a custom PHP site and the URL profiles will be different, so want to retain all link profiles and more importantly if a user visits the old urls via search then they are seamlessly transferred to the new equivalent page For example www.domain.com/about-us is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/aboutus.php www.domain.com/furniture is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/furniture-collections.php etc What is the best way of achieving this apart from .htaccess as not 100% confident of doing this. Could it be done via PHP or using meta tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas0 -
Tracking URLS and Redirects
We have a client with many archived newsletters links that contain tracking code at the end of the URL. These old URLs are pointing to pages that don't exist anymore. Is there a way to set up permanent redirects for these old URLs with tracking code? We have tried and it doesn't seem to work. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BopDesign0 -
301 Redirect - What happens to backlinks
Hello... One of my sites is losing rankings in G. I received the webmaster notification of unnatural links... My question is, should i do a 301 redirect of every page on my site to a new domain? If so, do the backlinks (which i believe are causing my rankings to drop) carry over? How about the good backlinks? Also, what would happen to the rankings i currently have on page 1? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850