Redirect how long

Yes, you read it correctly: avoid using redirects whenever you can. They increase load time and waste crawl budget. Please note that it's totally fine to use redirects for configuring your web server so that it serves URLs according your preferences. Even when link equity is maintained, redirects add load time to the user and bot journey. It's best to reduce redirects whenever possible.

Internal links should be direct. That being said, redirects are a completely normal part of a website. They just need to be handled correctly. This is obviously important from a user point of view, and because of that search engines deem it important as well. If you redirect to URLs that aren't relevant, you're risking search engines not consolidating the value of the old URL with the new one.

This results in what's called a soft error. When implementing redirects, it's best to use a target URL that closely resembles the original in both topic and intent. Too often, webmasters lazily redirect pages to their homepage or other off-topic pages, which can result in a soft , and Google dropping link equity through the redirect. Let ContentKing help.

Run a quick check with ContentKing to see what can be improved on your site and fix any redirect issues right away. When using redirects, be vigilant against chained redirects.

It's important to avoid chained redirects for two reasons:. Then the authority arriving at URL D is: 0. It's important to choose a preferred version of your website URL and stick with it. Below we describe two important topics you need to think about when linking. Consistently using the preferred version of your website URL prevents unnecessary redirects, which cause loss of page authority. For example: if you prefer to have your website on the www subdomain, make sure requests for URLs without the www subdomain are redirected to the version with the www subdomain.

Remember: for search engines, www. Choose your preference when it comes to trailing slashes as well. For search engines, www. If you prefer having a trailing slash: make sure requests to the version of the page without the trailing slash are redirected to the version with the trailing slash.

When people link out to other sites, they sometimes make mistakes. They could introduce a combination of lowercase and uppercase characters into your URL. People will link to your website the way they want to. Often they won't adhere to your preferred version for your website URL. When you've correctly configured your web server, visitors will end up at the right URL, but you'll lose a bit of authority in the redirect.

Monitor your inbound links with a tool such as Majestic or Ahrefs and reach out to the ones linking to the wrong version of your URLs. A lot of websites use campaign URLs to support their online and offline campaigns. After these campaigns end, their URLs are often just redirected.

That's often incorrect, because these campaigns may return one month later. When a campaign is simply temporarily inactive and will return in the future: use a redirect to be able to keep the campaign URL in the search engine indexes when you need it again. If there's any doubt about it, use a redirect so that you basically have the URL on standby. Having hundreds of thousands of redirects may, depending on the way the redirects are implemented, slow a website down significantly.

On top of that, sometimes old redirects can play a vital role in strange website behavior. An old redirect could be causing inexplicable behavior within your website.

Keep things simple; keep the number of redirects within your website to a minimum. Periodically check which redirects are necessary and which can be cleaned up. These URLs can be found by analyzing the inbound links to pages on your website using services such as Majestic and Ahrefs combined with referral data from your web analytics service. All URLs that redirect but have no inbound links and referring traffic can be removed. I prefer to clean up redirects where possible to preserve SEO authority, and I aim to have as little redirects as possible on internal links in general to reduce impact on Googlebot crawling.

When prioritizing development resources on fixing redirects, I usually put an estimate of user impact being a ms delay for each hop.

IP canonicalization is the process of implementing redirects for an IP address to a domain name. This is done to prevent duplicate content. If your web server is set up incorrectly, it may serve your website for both your web server's IP address and your domain name.

The strange user experience aside, having your website accessible to search engines through both your IP address and your domain name leads to duplicate content and should be avoided. There's good news: this problem is not hard to solve. For example, if you're using Apache web server, this can be fixed by including the code below in your.

Note: replace This means that even if a significant amount of time has passed and Google has already recognized that your site moved, it might still point to your old domain if the said active links are clicked. Hence, Mueller advised site owners to do their own due diligence as well. He said that publishers should try to spread the word about their move as much as possible.

Aside from informing your followers and users, it would be beneficial if you also reach out to the owners of the links. The latter measure would at least give your partners the opportunity to update accordingly from their end as well. Basically, Mueller suggests that you should keep your redirects as long as possible and reasonable.

After taking the necessary steps like informing the relevant parties of the move and disseminating the information in the hopes of reaching your future visitors, give Google sufficient time to recognize your move.

If you are moving from one domain to another, try to keep your redirects for as long as there are sites or links that are still pointing to your former URL. In fact, if you see no pressing reason to remove it, the best decision is to just leave it there. Apart from potentially hurting your ranking, getting rid of your redirects could mean bad customer experience for your users as well.

Seeing error pages or outdated pages would badly hurt your reputation and could even cost you lost leads. Another factor to consider before removing your redirects is your site traffic. It would be too risky to suddenly get rid of your old domain especially if your old links are bringing in so much traffic from users who still find them relevant. This requires more upfront setup but can be easier to identify redirect usage than when using log files.

It really breaks down into two simple steps: adding the tracking and reviewing the data. We can add UTM tracking parameters to the redirect destination. This is especially helpful when you are redirecting one domain to another. These kinds of redirects are harder to track in log files. As well, these types of redirects are usually more expensive since you have to pay for the secondary domain you redirect to your main domain, so you want an easy way to measure the return on that investment in the secondary domain.

Here is a video I recorded discussing the process of setting up redirects with trackable parameters, including more reasons why you may want to do this.

If a link contained on your website redirects and is tracked in this way, you would distort your traffic source reports. Then, after the redirect is established, you can go to Google Analytics to review. In this table, search for all redirects or a specific redirect. To me, this is enough traffic over this time range to justify keeping that redirect in place. A redirected URL may not have traffic now, but it might have traffic in the future.

For example, although my domain for my website is matthewedgar. The domain matthewedgar. Before you delete a redirect simply because it lacks traffic, stop to consider who might use that redirect in the future.

If even one or two people use that redirect in the next five years, could it lead to something valuable? If so, keep the redirect. The second question to consider is if people out on the web still linking to the redirected URL.

If people are still linking to the URL, those links still are providing some value—either by sending traffic through that redirected URL to your website or by helping your SEO. As a result, redirects with backlinks should almost always be maintained.

To begin, we want to find the backlinks pointing to redirects. There are a variety of tools available to help us do this, including Moz , Ahrefs , and Majestic. All three tools work in slightly different but all give you a way to review who is linking to you. We have already looked at the way search engines handle and redirects differently, but you do need to carefully consider which type is right for you to use. In fact, the Semrush study suggested that You can use the Semrush backlink analytics tool to uncover pages that have links pointing to them.

If there is a close match between the content on Page A and Page B, PageRank will be passed along redirects, even in instances when a redirect is used. When there is no match between the content, the redirect will be classed as a soft and would not bass PageRank. However, redirects should be used in preference when you wish to pass link authority to a new URL. In fact, in many ways, they are the exact opposite; as long as they are used in the right instances.

This can cause keyword rankings to drop and users to bounce from the site. That said, redirects should not be overused and issues such as redirect chains and loops should be avoided whenever possible. Hello JohnMu , Is there a defined period to keep a redirect? In summary, redirects are they to keep for unlimited time or must it delete after a while?

However, in cases where the number is not significant, there is no harm in this being longer. Sometimes, you will know that a redirect is in place because you are forwarded to a different location when visiting the URL.

But how do you test redirects to check whether they are working properly or are s or s? You can see both temporary and permanent redirects in your site audit report and Google Search Console. If you want to test a specific URL, you can use a tool such as httpstatus. You need to use redirects whenever you change the location of a web page.

Take the time to understand how redirects work, learn the different types you can use, and spend some time testing them and you will be ready to implement them and prevent the common issues that are often seen. Remember, check out the Semrush site audit tool to gain insights into issues your website may have due to a redirect chain and redirect loops.