Redirects Advice Please
-
Hi All,
I have been approached by someone to look at their website who has seen a rank drop over the last week of around 15 places.
On a quick look at their website I have seen what I am imaging could be the culprit as I imagine it will be creating a re-direct loop. However, i am not 100% with these things so would like some others opinions.com
They have a wordpress website.
There home page lets say https://theirsite.com/
They have an internal page built for a search term https://www.theirsite.com/keyword
In wordpress they have set that page in settings to be the homepage.
However, I looked on their server and via htaccess they have a 301 redirect from https://www.theirsite.com/keyword to https://www.theirsite.com/
So the questions are:
1. Could this be creating a loop?
2. The redirect was placed around a week before the rank drop. Could this possibly be the cause of the drop?
3. I am assuming that removing the 301 from htaccess is recommended?
Thanks in advance for any advice
-
Hi Dale
If that loop you have specified there was true then the homepage wouldn't show up.
https://www.theirsite.com/keyword>https://www.theirsite.com/>https://www.theirsite.com/keyword ad infinitum...
It would just keep on going and Google wouldn't be able to show the page.
You could use Screaming Frog to check for redirect chains - SEMrush and MOZ also pick them up so scanning the site would be my preferred option before touching it. Failing that I would remove it and see what happens.
Regards Nigel
-
Hi There,
This is a common practice and a very common redirect example. and I have seen them contributing to the homepage/main website authority. You can use it and analyze the impact before making any further changes. I had a client who has a very valuable page with content with a certain keyword, they later on 301 redirected the page to the homepage along with the content, this had a very positive impact for their main page DA for that specific keyword. But, I would recommend testing and analyzing everything before reaching a conclusion.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have further questions.
Regards,
Vijay
-
Inside PHPMyAdmin, Check WP-Options and make sure the website in the 2 spots it's entered are correct.
-
Thanks. The guy is actually not using cloudflare in this case. His htaccess file is structurally correct, the only issue I am unsure about is the fact that there was a 301 redirect from the page set as front page in wordpress to the homepage url.
Obviously this is not standard practice and I am going to remove it, but I was wondering about peoples opinions to see if that 301 redirect would of been causing a loop.
Thanks again
-
Where I most often see a redirect loop is when someone switches over to CloudFlare on the WordPress platform. If it isn't CloudfFare causing this redirect then the first thing you'll probably want to do is change the .htaccess file name to something else and make sure it's baked up then create a new one. First try this stock base .htaccess:
# BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> # END WordPress
Then you go down the checklist
- Delete the newly created htaccess file and allow WordPress the opportunity to create one on it's own
- Change the name of the plugins folder to temporarily disable plugins to see if that's the cause
- change the name of the active theme folder to force the use of a stock theme.
It will very likely be one of those items causing the redirect. The only other thing it could be is if Wordpress just got relocated and is pointing at a different domain. In which case you would need to change that in PHPMyAdmin under WP-Options.
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
-
SEO Redirect
If we have several hundred domain names currently using a park page, would we be better served having them redirect to our corporate homepage for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | mkessler0 -
Temporary Redirect - on nonexistant URL
I'm getting a Temporary Redirect issue on | http://www.luckygemstones.com/botswana-legends.htm http://www.luckygemstones.com/botswana-legends.htm | http://www.luckygemstones.com/page-not-found.htm | 1 | 0 | 302 | YET! There is no such page on my site. I believe I had one once, but has been corrected for a while now. WHY is SEOMOZ picking this up as an error and how can I fix? Kathleen http://www.luckygemstones.com
Technical SEO | | spkcp1110 -
Should I do a 301 redirect
Hi Everyone, Hope you can help me out here. I have .co.uk & .ie website with similar content. On a particular section of the .co.uk website it is updated daily (Q&As, Blog posts etc) .ie does have this section but to a lesser degree, no daily updates etc, I was wondering if we should simply do a 301 redirect when someone is on the .ie website to .co.uk, it means the user is getting a much better experience however not entirely the consequences from search engines on this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Paul781 -
302 Redirects for Wordpress Blog Trackbacks
I'm a newbie, and just got my first crawl diagnostics report. I was looking at the temporary redirects, and virtually all of them are trackback URLs from our blog (we use ourdomain.com/blog and Wordpress). The diagnostics report says they're 302 redirects. Is this problematic and, if so, can you suggest the best way to fix the problem? Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | sally580 -
301 Redirect & re-use
I have an old site which is being moved to a new tld due to re-branding. I understand I would do a series of 301 redirects from the pages of the old site to capture the authority and move to the new site. However, at some point in the future (probably 1-2 years) we may want to re-use the old site again for a different brand (it has a good brand, just not for what we're going after). Question is - can a redirected site be re-used at some point in the future? And if so, which site would new authority (links, etc.) go to?
Technical SEO | | uwaim20120 -
301 Redirect for homepage with language code
In my multilingual Magento store, I want to redirect the hompage URL with an added language code to the base URL. For example, I want to redirect http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to http://www.mysite.com/ which has the exact same content. Using a canonical URL will help with search engines, but I would just rather nip the problem in the butt by not showing http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to visitors in the first place. Problem is that I don't want (can't have) all /tw/ removed from URLs due to Magento limitations, so I just want to know how to redirect this single URL. Since rewrites are on, adding Redirect 301 /tw http://www.88kbbq.com would redirect all URLs with the /tw/ language code to ones without. Not an option. Hope folks can lend a hand here.
Technical SEO | | kwoolf0 -
Are asp redirects permanent?
I need to redirect a windows-hosted domain with permanent (301) redirects so as to preserve most of the link juice. I would be using asp page-level redirects, as there are only about 50 relevant pages. Are these as effective as linux-based 301 redirects in conserving link juice?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Too many 301 redirects - good or bad?
Hi, Currently, page A is redirecting to page B. I am in the process of developing new site for the same domain and this time page B will be redirected to page C. This is gonna happen on many pages. Is it correct or should i adopt some other strategy? Will it have adverse effect on the speed of my site? Page A -----> Page B ------> Page C Regards, Shailendra
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0