Too Many Redirects? Options

[Bandy1080]

I have a client that has a bunch (over 200) of 301 redirects (they switched domain names 6 months ago) and about 100 302 redirects. Now I know 302 redirects are bad for seo. But can someone have too many 301 redirects?

[JohnMu]

302 redirect aren't bad for SEO per se, they're just different than 301 redirects .

You can't really have too many redirects - you can only have too many chained for a single URL (ie initial.htm -> b -> c -> d -> final.html; max 5 are allowed for http/1.0). If you're redirecting a whole site, all URLs from the old domain will be redirecting, theoretically you'd have almost infinite URLs being redirected .

I wouldn't worry too much about it. It would be best if those redirects were no longer needed, but you'd have to make sure that all links out there are now pointing to the new domain (which is almost impossible) and that all older users update their bookmarks and change the URL in their "soft-memory" (impossible).

What kind of 302 redirects are they using?

John

[bsaric]

I have done a lot of redirects lately, a lot more then 200 and its pretty good and fast with all SE.

[storyspinner]

Hi Bandy1080, thanks for posting the question!

Perhaps understanding the type of redirect you're doing will help you to understand what pages should be redirected and why?

A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect of a page. This means to the engines, "this is only redirect for the time being to this other page, we'll be putting it back eventually."

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect of a page. This means to the engines, "this page is permanently moving to this other place, please make note of it." From then on, the engines will know to go to that new page, and "hopefully" everything (link juice/quality) will also pass over (eventually).

There's no "limit" on the redirects you have, it could just end up being a nightmare for your IT staff or yourself to manage and keep track of!

This post has been edited by storyspinner: Mar 1 2007, 03:31 PM

[Bandy1080]

I have heard that having a 302 redirect up for a long period of time can actually hurt your SEO efforts. I am going to have them take care of all their 302 redirects and worry about the 301s later.

[eKstreme]

There's no "limit" on the redirects you have, it could just end up being a nightmare for your IT staff or yourself to manage and keep track of!

Depending on what kind of "limit" we are talking about. If we talk about serial redirects (so page A->B->C->...), then there is a limit. We've talked about this before, but in a nutshell: the HTTP 1.0 protocol defines an upper limit of 5 consecutive redirects. HTTP 1.1 doesn't have that limit, but a lot of bots and browsers still enforce the 5 redirects limit. Set up a serial redirector and browse to it in Firefox or IE and you'll get an error.

Pierre

[JohnMu]

A proper (in-domain) 302, even if left online for a long time, is no problem with the search engines. Lots of sites do it, when they need to move users from a generic URL to a specialized one (often from the root to some personalized URL -- see www.amazon.com ).

John

[storyspinner]

Pierre ... I was referring more toward the actual number (quantity wise) that it seemed was being referred to there in the question (although I could have misunderstood)

Now you are correct on the number of redirects a page has itself .... in fact what you have described - that might even been seen as "gaming" to a search engine.

John - Google does recommend 301's if the redirect is to be permanent, that way the make sure everything goes over and is followed. Although "lots" of sites do it, there are a lot of others that have issues with this - that's why Google recommends going over to the 301's if its truly a permanent.

From my own experience - this was an exact issue we were having, prior to my involvement it was 302'd ... when it should have been 301'd and once we did the right redirect - Poof! We were back in business!

Sometimes Google's "recommendations" are good (and not evil!)

[bsaric]

A proper (in-domain) 302, even if left online for a long time, is no problem with the search engines. Lots of sites do it, when they need to move users from a generic URL to a specialized one (often from the root to some personalized URL -- see www.amazon.com ).

True, but i have seen a lot of sites with lower rankings just becose 302 redirect in that cases.

This post has been edited by bsaric: Mar 2 2007, 01:19 PM

[JohnMu]

How can you tell that it's because of the redirect? Unless you do a 1:1 test / comparison with all other factors as identical as possible, it seems to me to be impossible to determine that lower rankings result because of a 302 redirect that is in place. Assuming you were to remove the redirect, you would have to wait several months to make a comparison -- in that time, many things can happen (not the least of which would include your optimizing the rest of the site and working on and executing a new link-strategy).

One thing I can imagine is that a page that is 302 redirected could possibly have a disadvantage to a page that is static with regards to 3rd party factors: links going to the detail page - because it is visible in the browser, perhaps even links going to many different, personalized detailed pages, "scrapers" taking the detail page with its URL instead of the root URL, etc. I can also imagine that it might take a little bit longer for changes to propgate from crawl to the index on a page with a 302 redirect, but even that seems to be minimal (Google follows the 302 redirect right away, it does not wait for a second crawl).

All I want to say with this is that a 302 redirect is not automatically the death of SEO for a site . I won't argue that it would be better to not redirect (especially with regards to the 3rd party factors mentioned), but sometimes that is a lot of work or impossible with the limited resources available -- but if you can easily move from 302 redirected pages to "static" pages, go ahead and do it.

John

[bsaric]

All I want to say with this is that a 302 redirect is not automatically the death of SEO for a site

I'm not saying that also, but i'm pretty sure that 302 can be big problem, specially for minor websites, which don't have bunch of links.

Assuming you were to remove the redirect, you would have to wait several months to make a comparison -- in that time, many things can happen

Why several months? It can happen in a week or in couple of days.

[joedolson]

I think that more context is needed for this statement:

I'm not saying that also, but i'm pretty sure that 302 can be big problem, specially for minor websites, which don't have bunch of links.

Is it the 302 which is the problem? Or is it a combination of the 302 redirect AND some other factor?

How is this 302 being used which is causing the perceived problem? Is it directing from an old domain to a new domain? Is it directing the old contact.htm page to the new /contact/ directory? Is it sending users from an obsolete product page to the current version? Is it sending queries to a seasonal event page off to a notice that summer events aren't occurring right now?

All of these scenarios are subtly different applications of the redirect which may have completely different consequences for a search engine. I don't think that it's fair to say that a 302 redirect, by itself causes any kind of SEO problem - it may be more accurate to say that certain uses of a 302, in combination with other factors, may cause problems.

I'd be very interested to see some more detail about the situations in which you've seen problems caused by 302 redirects, bsaric.

[bsaric]

Is it the 302 which is the problem? Or is it a combination of the 302 redirect AND some other factor?

It's just a 302 redirect. Example in the root is index.php which has 302 redirect to main.php (with no valid reason). If domain has PR5 on homepage, and inner pages PR1 (1 click from homepage), something is wrong, i most cases it's just redirect not passing PR and inner pages have lower rankings. If inner pages have lower rankings hole domain has little lower rankings then it can be.

I think M.Cutts did write about it, how 302 sometimes is not passing PR, but i can't find it right now.

I have seen that problem many times on domains on which i work. Here is one, planik.hr 2 weeks ago it was behind top 100 for "auto camp" and all other stronger keywords, after i did take the job, i have first remove 302 redirect and leave it for a week (i have done nothing else), check the rankings now for "auto camp". Hole domain has a boost for a lot of primary keywords.

I have done same stuff couple days ago for edunet.hr which has 302 from index.php to main.php, i'm still waiting for Google to catch the pages without 302 redirect. I have seen the same for atleast 20 domain in last couple months.

But again i could be wrong, you never know

This post has been edited by bsaric: Mar 2 2007, 04:25 PM

[storyspinner]

Joe... my issues was just like bsaric's ....

client's pages since they did the redirect, the redirected pages weren't ranking, in some cases it was still the old ones. that's because it was a 302 redirect and not a 301.

once i figured out that was what was causing the issue and put on the 301 redirect on (i think the longest one we waited on was a month), they all started to rank for the previous page's terms and PR did pass over then.

and that's my story.... puns intended

[joedolson]

I guess my argument (phrased more accurately than before) is that a correctly used 302 is not an SEO problem - these are all examples of incorrectly used 302's, so I see little reason that Google should pass any ranking for them.

A correctly used 302 wants the ranking to stay with the originating page rather than the destination page; a correctly used 301 wants rankings to follow to the final destination.

If a site is using a 302 to send traffic permanently off to an alternate address, that's a serious mistake: they're telling search engines "Hey! We're sending you off to this address, but don't bother trying to keep track of the new address --- it's only temporary!"

[JohnMu]

If I understand you two correctly, this was a 302 redirect where it should have been (technically) either no redirect or at the very least a 301 redirect, right? If so, then a 302 redirect would have been wrong and it would make sense that you would have problems with it (which can be cleaned up fairly quickly with a proper 301 redirect).

A 302 redirect should not pass PR to the redirection target - it should remain in the URL that is doing the redirect.

As I mentioned, there are however effects from 3rd parties which might confuse things (note: these are all in-domain redirects), eg:

Page-A -> 302 -> Page-B

In this situation, Page-A would remain listed in the search results and would retain the PR. It would be listed with the contents of Page-B.

However, as soon as you add external links pointing to Page-B, then you have a duplicate-content situation:

external links -> Page-B
Page-A -> 302 -> Page-B

Page-B will gain value from the external links. Somewhere along the way, Page-B will have enough value (from the external links, not from the 302 redirect) to get a listing of its own; with enough value, it might even rank above Page-A. You will have two separate URLs which are competing for the same content - a classical duplicate content situation. The problem with this is that you are splitting the total inbound link value among Page-A and Page-B, each of which has different inbound links.

The solution could be one of the following:
- make sure that Page-B does not gain links (eg use a very long/obscure or personalized URL)
- to release the URL of Page-A and go with a 301 redirect (which would cause Page-A to not be listed any more)
- instead of having a redirect, put the contents of Page-B on Page-A and 301-redirect Page-B to Page-A.

To me, one of the only places a 302 redirect really makes sense is if you have a CMS that requires long, complicated URLs from the start, ie:
www.domain.com -> 302 -> www.domain.com/cms/main/section?lang=en&page=main&date=now&bla=bla

In this kind of situation, you do not want the long URL to get indexed, it will just confuse people. The long URL will most likely also not gain any direct links - it's too complicated.

With some CMS this is almost unavoidable. However, this is only the case in a very small percentage of the pages that redirect (for everything else, a 301-redirect is correct). With a bit of work, you can however get it cleaned up. Amazon used to have long URLs like that, which people would get through a series of 3-4 302-redirects from the root URL. They have since cleaned it up - www.amazon.com stays that way, it's not redirected.

Whenever you can avoid a redirect with a reasonable "cost" (time spent on trying to get it out), I would do it - each redirection takes time and the user wants his answer "yesterday". However, there are many situations where a redirect is the only solution and there are a few situations where a 302 redirect is the proper solution.

John

[bsaric]

I guess my argument (phrased more accurately than before) is that a correctly used 302 is not an SEO problem - these are all examples of incorrectly used 302's, so I see little reason that Google should pass any ranking for them.

Well, it's not important if is SEO problem or SE problem, it's not important if is correctly used or not, it's not a problem what G thinks about it. I understand what you saying but you are watching from different point of view.

It was a problem for G which is now fixed and thats it .

@softplus

I understand also what you saying, thanks for the long explanation, i have just trying to say that sometimes it can be just 302 redirect without thinking to much about if it used right or wrong. It can be problem which can be solved very quickly.

This post has been edited by bsaric: Mar 2 2007, 06:31 PM

[Ron Carnell]

It's a bit like putting salt in your coffee and then complaining that there's a problem with the salt. You probably wanted sugar? Which doesn't mean you won't still want salt for your eggs tomorrow morning.

Little white powders? Not interchangeable.

[storyspinner]

Ron.... that made me LMAO!!!

fits perfectly!!

[storyspinner]

There's an article that just popped up on Web Pro World tonight, that's pretty relevant to this thread: Google Confirms 301's Better Than 302's