9 replies to this topic

[tommr]

When going through my webmaster tools I notice that from time to time there are 404 results from places like obscure search sites that are looking for a well formed but non existent url from my site.
I was wondering how nit-picky I should be in setting up redirects.
Can my .htaccess file be too large?

[tommr]

Lastly,
I try to send the 301 to the most logical place but in some cases there is no place.
For example we used to have a links directory but we discontinued it.
So when I find a 301 to a file in the links directory I usually send it to the home page.
After thinking about it I wondered if it would be better to create a new page or send the 301 to the site map.

Edited by A.N.Onym after merging a duplicate thread with this one.

Edited by A.N.Onym, 27 January 2012 - 12:24 AM.

[jonbey]

No harm in doing a few Redirect 301's for these. I have so many lines in my htaccess file. A few weeks ago I spent some time trying to reduce the number. I changed my site so many times that I have loads of rules.

Too many? I dunno, I have heard people here talk about too many, no idea myself. If it means having a bunch of links pointing to the right page / a relevant page then it can only be good for the use and you.

[iamlost]

There are only two things that I consider when deciding on a 301 redirect:
1. that there are no strung together 301s:
---the longer the chain the greater the likelyhood of error.
---Google is believed to reduce value(s) (PR has been mentioned by Matt Cutts) by ~15% per 301 in the chain. If this is true then for every additional - and now extraneous - 301 you are throwing away hard won value.

2. that there is substantive value to be derived above serving up a custom 404 not found page. Basically, either that there is some substantive traffic threshold looking in the wrong place(s) or in the wrong way(s) for the same destination or to clarify/simplify for SE indexing/ranking reasons, i.e. non-www to www (or vice versa), [ /index.html to / ].

My understanding is that there is no limit to the number of redirects allowed in htaccess. However, at some point server efficiency would be noticeably affected.

[jonbey]

Did not know about that 15% rule, I had better review my redirects again. I still have links that point to my first domain. I changed my URL structure about 5 or 6 times for some pages (static in root, then static in subdirectory, then transferred to Blogger FTP, then transferred to Wordpress in a subdirectory, then transferred to Wordpress in the root, and even some additional changes, such as dropping the .html in the static days). Best make sure that all redirects go to the new URL immediately!

[jonbey]

ok, it took me bloody ages (all evening) but I managed to fix all Redirect 301s in my htaccess file.

As I am not a techy person I used the tools I understood, so I dumped htaccess lines (a few hundred at a time) into a Wordpress Page and then ran the Broken Link Checker and Fixed Redirects. Then copied the lines back over. (if you decide to take this wacky approach note that in Broken Link Checker you can request it to only check Plain Text URLs and also only check Private (or Draft) pages, so it will not check an entire site each time. I used a smaller site (0 traffic) to do it all in though.

A painful and time consuming process, but I now know that each redirect in the file is used just once, no bouncing through 3 or 6 redirects before getting to the final destination.

There are probably faster, better and far more sensible ways of doing this.

Right, got 30 minutes to get my workout in!

Edited by jonbey, 30 January 2012 - 06:28 PM.

[iamlost]

Hey, jonbey...now we are waiting with bated breath to hear if all your effort shows tangible returns over the next while...

[jonbey]

I fear it will be impossible to tell because as usual I have made about a gadzillion changes over the last month, and seen many changes already.

My guess is that fewer redirects (hopefully zero) within my site will please the bots and encourage them to dig deeper and return more often.

[tommr]

so I dumped htaccess lines (a few hundred at a time) into a Wordpress Page and then ran the Broken Link Checker and Fixed Redirects.

I don't think I have 100 lines so maybe it should only take me 1/2 a bloody age to tune it up. On second thought it will probably take me longer. (ADHD)

[jonbey]

I had around 4500 lines ..... yours should take about 5 minutes!