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301 redirect hops from non-https and www
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It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop.
It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain.
The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not
In which case, you could have:
- Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar
- 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page.
Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.
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Maybe I'm missing something? You can implement an htaccess rewrite rule (or equivalent for your server stack) using regex/host so that essentially
http://example.com/foo OR https://example.com/foo redirect to https://example.com/bar That's the standard approach and serves in one hop. Is there something I'm missing why you're getting into a load balancer etc to accomplish this?P.
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Hello there,
I´d suggest you to go for the Option 1: two hops.
Google understands well up to 4-5 hops. Matt Cutts said it in these videos:
Can too many redirects from a single URL have a negative effect on crawling? Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site?Also, I think that setting a 301 to a 404, it would give to GoogleBot mixed signals and there could be some cases where you get some links to that 301->404 page and lost that ones.
Best luck!
GR.
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