Why redirects are bad

When most people think about SEO today, we focus on areas such as content, public relations, and social signals. While these are vital components, some companies are missing the most fundamental issues that may be holding their organic search performance back.

Redirects are one of those factors that, while most of us understand are important for SEO, not many of us know exactly where they need to be used and how to implement them correctly. In this post, I will cover the biggest mistakes that companies make with SEO redirects, and how you can avoid them. Ideally, any published content on your website should never move or disappear.

However, in reality, website redesigns, edits, and restructuring happens regularly; forcing content to move to different locations, new URLs, merge into other information or get removed completely.

Redirects help you guide users and search engines to find the content as it gets moved, or direct them to the most appropriate alternative resource if it has been removed. Over time, these pages can present outdated, unmaintained content; delivering a bad experience to users and costing you sales or leads.

This deviation presents users with a message informing them that the page they are looking for cannot be found. Most websites use the standard error page, which is extremely unhelpful to users because they lose all navigation options. Custom errors are better because it allows you to display alternative options and navigation to the user along with the message; however, it is still not a great experience for users. Redirects are pretty simple.

It will explain when to use redirects, how they affect SEO, what types of redirects exist, and which of them are worth implementing. Server-side redirects happen when a client browser sends HTTP requests to a web server to receive some response 3xx code.

There are seven of them:. The status code indicates the permanent relocation of a website. By using a redirect, you are telling a search engine:. My website has been moved permanently. I want you to stop indexing the old URL and start indexing this new one instead.

Please bring all my visitors to the new page. Thank you. However, no one knows for sure how much of it is passed, because Google never discussed it publicly. Also, redirects may help when recreating or consolidating content. Suppose you have three different articles on a keyword research topic.

One day you decide to merge them into one to avoid keyword cannibalization issues. So you combine these three pieces into the longer one. Then you send users and search engines from these posts to the new one using a redirect.

That way you stop competing with yourself in SERP and have better chances to rank this new post higher because Google loves longer and meaningful articles. However, you need to understand that this redirect is permanent. You should use it only if you are moving your website for good. The status code indicates the temporary relocation of a website. My website has been moved temporarily. I want you to keep indexing the old URL instead of the new one.

That means a search engine will not pass the link equity to the new URL. However, if you keep a redirect for too long, search engines will start to consider it a redirect, therefore passing the link equity to the new URL. So be careful. Whether the URL was typed in incorrectly or the page has been deleted, this is not a good thing. This message could also appear if a redirect is not set up properly.

Generally, a error means that the website or web page no longer exists. It is in the best interest of your site to at the very least have a customized error in which the user can get back to the main site instead of reaching a dead end. That is a sure way to lose traffic to your site. It will tell Google never revisit this page because it no longer exists. This is good because then it will no longer show up in search engine results.

An example of when this could come in handy is if you own a business that no longer offers a particular service. The page about that service is no longer needed.

Besides, you would not want it to show up in search engine results because you may attract unwanted, mistaken customers. There are several different tools available to assist you in checking to see if your redirects are functioning properly. One example is a Chrome browser extension called Link Redirect Trace.

It checks for broken or incorrect redirects and alerts you so you can make changes and preserve your SEO ranking. Another tool is the Google Search Console.

This allows you to check for errors and fix them without having to look at each page. Finally, Content Forest is a tool in which you can copy over your URL and paste it to check for redirects. If any exist, it will provide you with a code to go with the URL and map the path of your redirects.

This allows you to check for errors easily. We already know that serving a is the best way to go when you want to keep your SEO rankings because it tells the bots that the page has moved permanently. Keep in mind that when moving a page from one URL to another URL, the bots will take some time to find the , recognize it, and credit the new page with the rankings of its predecessor.

This process can take even longer if the crawlers do not visit the page very often or if the new does not properly resolve. When you set up redirects, it is vital that you do not lose or harm your SEO rankings. SEO rankings are imperative to getting visitors to your site. Whether you are trying to sell something, spread knowledge or just enjoy a hobby, changes are the more people who find your site, the better.

This is infinitely so if you are trying to sell things. If you have a successful website that for one reason or another you need to redirect, it would be detrimental if it was not set up properly and you lost all that you had worked for.

Along those same lines, even if your site was not successful, you could still lose what little rankings you once had if the redirects are not set up properly. Depending on the circumstances and reasons for needing the redirects, it may be worth looking into if you could avoid redirecting. This cannot always be done, however.

Failure to use a proper redirect can also result in lost PageRank. They are a terrible user experience and the search bots will penalize you meaningfully for it. When a user calls that page from the browser, the server returns a Page Not Found.

If the search bot gets a a few times, it will deindex the page from the search results. With a properly constructed redirect, any value from backlinks that point to your old pages will flow through the redirect to the new page. This can help you maintain your rankings within the SERPs and avoid drops in traffic and revenue. It is important to note, however, that there are different types of redirects, including http redirect, html redirect, redirect, and redirect.

Each of these redirects is best suited for particular purposes. Here are five things that all website owners should know about redirecting users. Proper redirects are an integral part of smart content pages. If you're looking to create a new website, check out this site checklist before you launch it. An HTML redirect will automatically send your page visitor to a new site after a certain amount of time.

It will generally give your visitor a message that the site has been moved and that they will be redirected in a few seconds. This type of redirect is often discouraged because the unexpected jump can be confusing for users.

They can also harm the user experience because in certain situations, using the back button on the browser will just take the user back to the redirecting page, causing them to get stuck in a loop.