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).
-
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.
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 an iframe redirect on the same Domain bad for SEO
Good morning. We have a vendor that has created a landing page with content that we want to use. Because of the way we built the site, the only way to use the content is to create an i-frame. The i-frame is re-directingon the same Domain. Would we benefit from the SEO Content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jdenbo_edf0 -
Do bulk 301 redirects hurt seo value?
We are working with a content based startup that needs to 301 redirect a lot of its pages to other websites. Will give you an example to help you understand. If we assume this is the startups domain and URL structure www.ourcompany.com/brand1/article What they want to do is do a 301 redirect of www.ourcompany.com/brand1/ to www.brand1.com I have never seen 301 as a problem to SEO or link juice. But in this case where all the major URLs are getting redirected to other sites i was wondering if it would have a negative effect. Right now they have just 20-30 brands but they are planning to hit a couple of hundreds this year.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aaronfernandez0 -
410 or 301 after URL update?
Hi there, A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!). The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible. I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution? On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist? Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore? Thanks for any insights 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
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 | | Chris81980 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
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 | | 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 -
NoIndexing Massive Pages all at once: Good or bad?
If you have a site with a few thousand high quality and authoritative pages, and tens of thousands with search results and tags pages with thin content, and noindex,follow the thin content pages all at once, will google see this is a good or bad thing? I am only trying to do what Google guidelines suggest, but since I have so many pages index on my site, will throwing the noindex tag on ~80% of thin content pages negatively impact my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
How do I go about changing a 302 redirect to a 301.
Hello Friends! Thanks for viewing my question. Ok,My question today is How do I go about redirecting a 302 link to a 301 link. I understand the benefits of doing this as far as link juice and how the Search Engines views the two Re-Directs. I am wanting to know where I would start to do this. Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0