301 redirect
-
We have just had an outside SEO agency report on our site: One of things brought up were arounf broken links, and how they class them as broken links.
Could any body tell me whether this statement holds true please, as I am not aware of this
"Our latest intelligence shows that google are downgrading ranking from sites that feature 301 redirects within the internal link structure".
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Regards
-
I need to 301-redirect about 25 product pages because I'm having a content management system installed in part of the site.
What's the definitive answer on this -- is some link authority lost along a 301 link? These page rank superbly & are high-traffic, so I can't afford to take unnecessary risks.
-
Thanks Sameer, I'll hav a look at those.
Regards
-
Sometimes the internal redirection issues will not show up on OSE. OSE data is not real time so it will take couple of weeks to get the most updated one (as per the last I heard from Rand in one of the webinar).
I generally use Xenu link Sleuth to identify all the redirection and page not found issues. Another tool that we use which is more advacned is Gsitecrawler.
-
Thanks Sameer,
They ahve provided us with a list of 301 directs: I cant find these on OSE though, and to be fair they don't really make sense {as to why we would want a 301on these links in the first place}
Sameer i look after the SEO for my agecny and their clients: If indeed what they are saying is correct and we have 301's on internal links I can't see them, and the case they are pointing out I would use rel=canonical.
Should they show in OSE: I've tried this and it says we have zero, which is my thoughts, as i would have had to do them
Cheers
-
Have they provided you a report showing all the links from each page that are linking to a 301 link instead of directly linking to the destination page? I would not take their words unless they show you reports.
301 in the internal link structure should not directly impact the ranking so as to down grade rankings but it could impact your page rank juice flow. The concept is similar to having multiple hoops between origin and destination page. If you have a link on the page that is pointing to a 301 version instead of direct link then chances (based on page rank juice flow math) your are not allowing a complete flow of juice through those links.
Here are some great posts from Rand on page rank juice flow
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/determining-whether-a-page-site-passes-link-juice
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-science-of-ranking-correlations
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-juice-is-loose (although controlling page rank is not a good practice anymore but this post is highly educational for anyone to understand the page rank flow)
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Sameer
-
Me too Thomas. I have requested that they share their "latest intelligence" and correlation with lost rankings. when/If I get an answer I'll be sure to post it.
Big thanks for everyones input here, really appreciated.
-
The only thing I don't understand about their claim is that it is "our latest intelligence". If that holds true, they are very slow catching industry news
301 is never perfect, but almost always the best way to keep rankings when moving content.
Wpuld also love to hear their elaboration of their latest intelligence.
-
This is interesting, because I assume this to be true and yet I've encountered the opposite. I used a simple 301 to direct an outdated page to a more relevant page on the same topic. Both pages were well-optimised, and the (slightly) newer page had more, higher-quality backlinks. I vanished from the SERPs for my keyword, and 3 months later hadn't returned - despite expecting Google to simply replace the listing for the old page with the new one. When I removed the 301, the original page appeared in the same position in the SERPs.
Because of this, I think it's best to be careful when it comes to 301s.
-
Hi Sean, never heard of that or experienced it. Here is a usefull interview by Eric Enge with Matt Cutts that really goes into the effects of a 301: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml.
I guess what they mean is the situation that if you are on page A on your site and click on the link to page B, and a redirect takes you to page C. Basically you could have gone from A to C directly. As the 301 dilutes a little bit of the page rank, it is by definition that sites utilising 301 internally this way lose a very little bit.
-
So you are 301ing from one domain to another? I have noticed this to take a long time to transfer any link juice and rankings. Two months which I thought was forever!
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LR8H8pn1M
Typically passes, but it can't be guaranteed. Yeah, that helps. Thanks Matt
-
Hi Sean,
As already mentioned Matt Cutts does talk about this and confirms that some link juice is lossed. You can catch his videos on YouTube at GoogleWebmasterHelp
I have personally not noticed any degregation in rankings due to using 301s. I will say that you should be careful with your 301s not to daisy chain them more than 3 times according to Matt if I remember correctly. Personally, I rather work my .htaccess file a bit more carfully not to 301 more than once or twice.
Cheers
-
Yes Matt Cutts also said that the anchor text value does not always go across or that Google does not guarantee it will work 100%.
-
Hello again Goodnewscowboy. I have just done exactly what you have said. I need to know obviously for future reference. I guess I was a little put out with some of the stuff they had put in there, which I thought didn't hold true.
Thanks for your time again, great to hear from you also.
Kind Regards
Sean
-
Thanks for the prompt reply Dejan, greatly appreciated. As far as I'm aware we haven't used 301's on internal linking. I have checked this in OSE and it doesn't show any?
My thoughts are the same as yours Dejan. We have recently had a redeisgn of the site { a couple of weeks ago} and to be fair I was looking at 301 ing some of the old content which held small amounts of link juice.
Thanks for our time again
-
Hey Sean: The only thing about 301'a and Google that I'm aware of is that 301's do lose a little "link juice" But this would be from any link, external or internal. I've not heard of a difference in ranking between the two.
Ask them to show you what that "latest intelligence" is and have them explain their rationale. If it's the real deal, they should be able to back it up with something.
-
The question is why use 301s for internal navigation? If it's for moved pages then it's appropriate.
Google in fact encourages 301 as a most robust solution for sorting out moved pages (apart from fixing it on the core level). Secondary to that would be use of canonical, some webmasters even go for meta redirect or good old 404.
By my observations there is nothing that can harm you, even chained 301s work - unless you manage to do something really exotic!
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
-
Forced Redirects/HTTP<>HTTPS 301 Question
Hi All, Sorry for what's about to be a long-ish question, but tl;dr: Has anyone else had experience with a 301 redirect at the server level between HTTP and HTTPS versions of a site in order to maintain accurate social media share counts? This is new to me and I'm wondering how common it is. I'm having issues with this forced redirect between HTTP/HTTPS as outlined below and am struggling to find any information that will help me to troubleshoot this or better understand the situation. If anyone has any recommendations for things to try or sources to read up on, I'd appreciate it. I'm especially concerned about any issues that this may be causing at the SEO level and the known-unknowns. A magazine I work for recently relaunched after switching platforms from Atavist to Newspack (which is run via WordPress). Since then, we've been having some issues with 301s, but they relate to new stories that are native to our new platform/CMS and have had zero URL changes. We've always used HTTPS. Basically, the preview for any post we make linking to the new site, including these new (non-migrated pages) on Facebook previews as a 301 in the title and with no image. This also overrides the social media metadata we set through Yoast Premium. I ran some of the links through the Facebook debugger and it appears that Facebook is reading these links to our site (using https) as redirects to http that then redirect to https. I was told by our tech support person on Newspack's team that this is intentional, so that Facebook will maintain accurate share counts versus separate share counts for http/https, however this forced redirect seems to be failing if we can't post our links with any metadata. (The only way to reliably fix is by adding a query parameter to each URL which, obviously, still gives us inaccurate share counts.) This is the first time I've encountered this intentional redirect thing and I've asked a few times for more information about how it's set up just for my own edification, but all I can get is that it’s something managed at the server level and is designed to prevent separate share counts for HTTP and HTTPS. Has anyone encountered this method before, and can anyone either explain it to me or point me in the direction of a resource where I can learn more about how it's configured as well as the pros and cons? I'm especially concerned about our SEO with this and how this may impact the way search engines read our site. So far, nothing's come up on scans, but I'd like to stay one step ahead of this. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | ogiovetti0 -
Recently migrated to https version of volusion site. 301 redirect link chain question
I recently migrated to a https version of a volusion site. They have some type of internal 301 redirect method to accommodate for the entire site. I have also used the 301 redirect manager to redirect categories and pages which I have changed. The question is if I have changed a page internally in the redirect manager from say source. /bluewidget to say. target. /superbluewidget is it wiser or even possible to do it this way to reduce the redirect chain from 3 to 2 steps source. /bluewidget to. target https://www.example/superbluewidget can a relative link be targeted to a full url to reduce steps in a 301 redirect link chain. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mrkingsley0 -
301 redirect syntax for htaccess
I'm working on some htaccess redirects for a few stray pages and have come across a few different varieties of 301s that are confusing me a bit....Most sources suggest: Redirect 301 /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html or using some combination of: RewriteRule + RewriteCond + RegEx I've also found examples of: RedirectPermanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html I'm confused because our current htaccess file has quite a few (working) redirects that look like this: Redirect permanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html This syntax seems to work, but I'm yet to find another Redirect permanent in the wild, only examples of Redirect 301 or RedirectPermanent Is there any difference between these? Would I benefit at all from replacing Redirect permanent with Redirect 301?
Technical SEO | | SamKlep1 -
301 redirected all my pages to my new domain, now I have a problem with Google Search Console
Hi guys! I bought a new domain name and redirected all my URLs from the old domain to the new one. Everything worked perfectly but now I have a little problem. I want to use the option 'Address Change' in google search console. Step 1 Works (Select new website in the list) Step 2 Works (Confirm that the 301 are working) Step 3 Asks me to Verify the old domain (huh!?) in order to complete the request. Obviously that doesn't work because my 301s WORKS! So if I try to verify the old website by putting a google file in the root of my domain Google tries to access it and it automatically redirects to the new domain. I must be missing something lol help!
Technical SEO | | benoit_20180 -
How best to fix 301 redirect problems
Hi all Wondering if anyone could help out with this one. Roger Bot crawler has just performed it's weekly error crawl on my site and I appear to have 18,613 temp redirect problems!! Rather, the same 1 problem 18,613 times. My site is a magento store and the errors it is giving me is due to the wishlist feature on the site. For example, it is trying to crawl links such as index.php/wishlist/index/add/product/29416/form_key/DBDSNAJOfP2YGgfW (which would normally add the item to one's wishlist). However, because Roger isn't logged into the website it means that all these requests are being sent to the login url with the page title of Please Enable Cookies. Would the best way to fix this be to enable wishlists for guests? I would rather not do that but cannot think of another way of fixing it. Any other Magento people come across this issue? Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
CNAME vs 301 redirect
Hi all, Recently I created a website for a new client and my next job is trying to get them higher in Google. I added them in OSE and noticed some strange backlinks. To my surprise the client has about 20 domain names. All automatically poiting to (showing) the same new mainsite now. www.maindomain.nl www.maindomain.be
Technical SEO | | Houdoe
www.maindomain.eu
www.maindomain.com
www.otherdomain.nl
www.otherdomain.com
... Some of these domains have backlinks too (but not so much). I suggested to 301 redirect them all to the main site. Just to avoid duplicate content. But now the webhoster comes into play: "It's a problem, client has only 1 hosting account, blablabla...". They told me they could CNAME the 20 domains to the main domain. Or A-record them to an IP address. This is too technical stuff for me. So my concrete questions are: Is it smart to do anything at all or am I just harming my client? The main site is ranking pretty well now. And some backlinks are from their copy sites (probably because everywhere the logo links to the full mainsite url). Does the CNAME or A-record solution has the same effect as a 301 redirect, from SEO perspective? Many thanks,
Hans0 -
How can I perform this 301 redirect?
I am working on a site for a colleague and have installed wordpress on their server in the wp directory, they want the root domain redirecting to the wp directory but everything i have tried seems to throw up errors. i need sample.co.uk to redirect to sample.co.uk/wp/ no matter which html file they are trying to access on the root of the sample.co.uk site help?
Technical SEO | | GrassRootsSEO0 -
Do search engines treat 307 redirects differently from 302 redirects?
We will need to send our users to an alternate version of our homepage for a few hours for a certain event. The SEO task at hand is to minimize the chance of the special homepage getting crawled and cached in the search engines in place of our normal homepage. (This has happened in the past so the concern is not imaginary.) Among other options, 302 and 307 redirects are being discussed. IE, redirecting www.domain.com to www.domain.com/specialpage. Having used 302s and 301s in the past, I am well aware of how search engines treat them. A 302 effectively says "Hey, Google! Please get rid of the old content on www.domain.com and replace it with the content on /specialpage!" Which is exactly what we don't want. My question is: do the search engines handle 307s any differently? I am hearing that the 307 does NOT result in the content of the second page being cached with the first URL. But I don't see that in the definition below (from w3.org). Then again, why differentiate it from the 302? 307 Temporary Redirect The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field. The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s) , since many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 307 status. Therefore, the note SHOULD contain the information necessary for a user to repeat the original request on the new URI. If the 307 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
Technical SEO | | CarsProduction0