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.
Multiple 301 redirects for a HTTPS URL. Good or bad?
-
I'm working on an ecommerce website that has a few snags and issues with it's coding.
They're using https, and when you access the website through domain.com, theres a 301 redirect to http://www.domain.com and then this, in turn, redirected to https://www.domain.com.
Would this have a deterimental effect or is that considered the best way to do it. Have the website redirect to http and then all http access is redirected to the https URL?
Thanks
-
My personal rule of thumb - as few redirect jumps as possible. Three main reasons:
1. User journey + Browsers - Sometimes when there are too many redirects taking place, some browsers find it difficult to follow through and would simply not load the page. Also, even if there were only 2-3, the browser may load, but users on slower connections may find it tiresome waiting for content to load.
2. As ThompsonPaul highlights, you COULD lose some link value due to dilution through 301 redirects.
3. Multiple 301 redirects are often used by spammers and I foresee in the near future these causing a lot of ranking headaches. The older the site, the longer the chain might end up - for example, imagine you had a product at:
https://domain.com/product1
Links to that page exist at domain.com/product1The journey would be: domain.com/product1 >http://domain.com/product1 > https://domain.com/product1
Now imagine a year down the line, product 1 is discontinued and you decide to redirect https://domain.com/product1 to domain.com/product2
Imagine your journey now:
domain.com/product1 >http://domain.com/product1 > https://domain.com/product1 > domain.com/product2 >http://domain.com/product2 > https://domain.com/product2
This could carry on indefinitely in the lifetime of the site...
Best solution: Decide what version of the site you want to use and simply try and use only one redirect, not a chain. Periodically check for chained redirects and resolve as you go along. (I try and do this bi annually).
- topic:timeago_earlier,29 days
-
To answer your specific question, Jason, yes, there's an issue with those URLs going through two consecutive redirects.
Each redirect, like any link, costs a little bit of "link juice". So running through two consecutive redirects is wasting twice as much link juice as if the origin URL redirects immediately to the final URL without the intermediate step. It's not a massive difference, but on an e-commerce site especially, there's no point in wasting any. (Some folks reckon the loss could be as high as 15% per link/redirect.) Plus, I've occasionally seen problems with referrer data being maintained across multiple redirects (anecdotal).
Hope that answers your specific question?
Paul
-
I agree with Jane. Unless there are reasons why the whole site needs to be secure, it makes more sense for just the areas where sensitive information is being submitted to be SSL encrypted.
http: requests are processed more quickly than https: ones due to the SSL handshake required to produce the cryptographic parameters for the user's session - so your site would be a little quicker if you weren't using SSL.
However, if you do decide to use http: rather than https: for the product & category pages like Jane has suggested - you'd need to ensure that the https: versions of these pages redirect to http:... again to avoid duplicate content.
-
Hi Jason,
To add to what Yusuf has said, is there a specific reason why the whole site has to use SSL, rather than just the parts of the website where sensitive information is passed? If so, I would be tempted to recommend that the e-commerce pages (products, categories, etc.) remain on HTTP URLs.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Hi Jason,
It's fine to 301 redirect from http: to https: and it's quite common for sites that use SSL. It's exactly the same principle as redirecting from a non-www to www (e.g. http://example.com to http://www.example.com) - which is considered to be good practice. But there should only be a single redirect. So you should ensure that http://example.com redirects to https://www.example.com without first redirecting to http://www.example.com.
I would also make sure that all pages (not just the homepage) redirect from http: to https: too to ensure there are no duplicate content issues on the rest of the site.
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
-
Is there any benefit to changing 303 redirects to 301?
A year ago I moved my marketplace website from http to https. I implemented some design changes at the same time, and saw a huge drop in traffic that we have not recovered from. I've been searching for reasons for the organic traffic decline and have noticed that the redirects from http to https URLs are 303 redirects. There's little information available about 303 redirects but most articles say they don't pass link juice. Is it worth changing them to 301 redirects now? Are there risks in making such a change a year later, and is it likely to have any benefits for rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 21, 2019, 10:42 AM | MAdeit0 -
301 Redirect from query string to new static page
If i want to create a redirect from a page where the slug ends like this "/?i=4839&mid=1000&id=41537" to a static, more SEO friendly slug like "/contact-us/", will a standard 301 redirect suffice? Thanks, Nails
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 13, 2018, 2:32 PM | matt.nails0 -
301 redirect hops from non-https and www
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: 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 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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 20, 2017, 1:26 AM | dsbud0 -
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 | Apr 26, 2017, 9:12 AM | Chris81980 -
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 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 6, 2011, 2:54 PM | Grenadi0 -
Any way to find which domains are 301 redirected to competitors' websites?
By looking at the work from an SEO collegue it became clear that his weak linkbuilding graph probably is not the cause for his good rankings for a pretty competitive keyword. (also no social mentions where found) I was wondering what it could be, site structure and other on page optimization factors seems to be ok and I don't think there will be exceptionally good or bad user behavior... Finally I looked at the competitors and found that they have more links, better content en better design, so I got a little stuck. The only reason I can think of is that he is doing 301 redirects (or is rel=canonical tags). Is there a way to trace these redirects back to the source in order to include this important variable in your competitor research? thnx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 30, 2011, 3:52 AM | djingel10 -
301 Redirects After Company Acquisition
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 11, 2011, 7:23 PM | pbhatt1