Redirects Advice Please
-
Hi All,
I have been approached by someone to look at their website who has seen a rank drop over the last week of around 15 places.
On a quick look at their website I have seen what I am imaging could be the culprit as I imagine it will be creating a re-direct loop. However, i am not 100% with these things so would like some others opinions.com
They have a wordpress website.
There home page lets say https://theirsite.com/
They have an internal page built for a search term https://www.theirsite.com/keyword
In wordpress they have set that page in settings to be the homepage.
However, I looked on their server and via htaccess they have a 301 redirect from https://www.theirsite.com/keyword to https://www.theirsite.com/
So the questions are:
1. Could this be creating a loop?
2. The redirect was placed around a week before the rank drop. Could this possibly be the cause of the drop?
3. I am assuming that removing the 301 from htaccess is recommended?
Thanks in advance for any advice
-
Hi Dale
If that loop you have specified there was true then the homepage wouldn't show up.
https://www.theirsite.com/keyword>https://www.theirsite.com/>https://www.theirsite.com/keyword ad infinitum...
It would just keep on going and Google wouldn't be able to show the page.
You could use Screaming Frog to check for redirect chains - SEMrush and MOZ also pick them up so scanning the site would be my preferred option before touching it. Failing that I would remove it and see what happens.
Regards Nigel
-
Hi There,
This is a common practice and a very common redirect example. and I have seen them contributing to the homepage/main website authority. You can use it and analyze the impact before making any further changes. I had a client who has a very valuable page with content with a certain keyword, they later on 301 redirected the page to the homepage along with the content, this had a very positive impact for their main page DA for that specific keyword. But, I would recommend testing and analyzing everything before reaching a conclusion.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have further questions.
Regards,
Vijay
-
Inside PHPMyAdmin, Check WP-Options and make sure the website in the 2 spots it's entered are correct.
-
Thanks. The guy is actually not using cloudflare in this case. His htaccess file is structurally correct, the only issue I am unsure about is the fact that there was a 301 redirect from the page set as front page in wordpress to the homepage url.
Obviously this is not standard practice and I am going to remove it, but I was wondering about peoples opinions to see if that 301 redirect would of been causing a loop.
Thanks again
-
Where I most often see a redirect loop is when someone switches over to CloudFlare on the WordPress platform. If it isn't CloudfFare causing this redirect then the first thing you'll probably want to do is change the .htaccess file name to something else and make sure it's baked up then create a new one. First try this stock base .htaccess:
# BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> # END WordPress
Then you go down the checklist
- Delete the newly created htaccess file and allow WordPress the opportunity to create one on it's own
- Change the name of the plugins folder to temporarily disable plugins to see if that's the cause
- change the name of the active theme folder to force the use of a stock theme.
It will very likely be one of those items causing the redirect. The only other thing it could be is if Wordpress just got relocated and is pointing at a different domain. In which case you would need to change that in PHPMyAdmin under WP-Options.
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
-
Redirect Question
We have a client that just did a redesign and development and the new design didn't really match their current structure. They said they didn't want to worry about matching site structure and never put any effort into SEO. Here is the situation: They had a blog located on a subdomain such as blog.domain.com - now there blog is located like domain.com/blog They want to create redirects for all the old the blog urls that used to be on the subdomain and not point to the domain.com/blog/post-name What is the best way of doing that - Through .htaccess?
Technical SEO | | Beardo0 -
301 Redirect domain with penalty
Wondering if I could get a few views on this please... I have added an affiliate store to a domain I own, however I forgot to noindex the product pages which were duplicate content of the merchants. Despite a good deal of backlink building the site will not do much in the engines at all, doesn't even come up on the first few pages for it's own name! This suggests to me that I have a duplicate content penalty. Try as I may I cannot get it removed so am thinking of cloning the domain to a new domain, however, I do not want to lose the links I collected so I am planning on 301ing them. While I will not get all the link power moved over, I should at least get credit for some of them which will kick start the new domain. Can anyone forsee any potential issues with doing this? Is there a danger of 301ing a site with a penalty that the penalty would be carried over? I know there is no penalty on the links, no WMT warnings etc, it is the content causing the issue. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Best Practice on 301 Redirect - Images
We have two sites that sell the same products. We have decided to retire one of the sites as we'd like to focus on one property. I know best practice is to redirect apples to apples, which in our case is easily done since the sites sold the same thing. www.SiteABC.com/ProductA can be redirected to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA. My question is how far does that thinking go regarding images? Each product has a main product page, of course, and then up to 6 images in some cases. Is it necessary to redirect www.SiteABC.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg? Or can they all be redirected to just the product page?
Technical SEO | | Natitude0 -
301 Redirect with ASP (not .NET)
I'm looking to redirect non www to www and also .co.uk to .com. http://www.xxxxx.com is the intended target. http://xxxxx.com & http://www.xxxxx.co.uk & http://xxxxx.co.uk to redirect. I managed to do some of this but if I come through to a service page /services/cars.asp it redirects to the homepage. All I have so far is this code: <% If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 ThenResponse.write "http://www." & Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST") & Request.ServerVariables("URL") & "?" & Request.ServerVariables("QUERY_STRING")Response.EndEnd if %> What am I missing?
Technical SEO | | Hughescov0 -
301 Single Page Redirects in IIS7?
Hey all -- I am working with a client, getting ready to make a full domain level change to a brand new domain. The existing domain has solid domain importance and trust, and the home page has a 5/10 GPR, so the transfer of all existing link juice is very important. Of course, I will be utilizing 301's to permanently redirect all existing pages to their new permanent homes. It will be a 1-1 structure, which I know is also best when possible. My question comes in specific to IIS. There is a wealth of information out there on the net regarding implementing permanent 301's using Apache and .htaccess, but nada when it comes to doing it in IIS7, which is what the client is using. For instance, today I am seeking to help them redirect 2 single pages to new destinations within the same domain, just diffferent folders. When you open up the IIS7 Control Panel (yes, with full Admin access), you can navigate to the directory, but the individual pages that I am looking to redirect with 301's do not show in IIS7, so you can't just right click on each page and choose "A redirection to a URL," etc. Any help on exactly how to redirect a single page using a permanent 301 in IIS 7 would be huge! Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | Bandicoot0 -
Redirect links add seo value?
Does anyone know if urls on the 'Websites' part of a LinkedIn public profile create any SEO value (meaning, does page rank flow)? The links looks like this: <a href="/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Espeechpad%2Ecom%2Fpage%2Fspeech-to-text&urlhash=Xk3F" target="_blank" title="New window will open" name="overviewsite">speech to texta>
Technical SEO | | scanlin0 -
301 Redirect Help
Hello! I am getting ready to launch my freshly coded site in the next week or so. My product URLs are changing SLIGHTLY and want to confirm I am going about things the right way: A. My LIVE site store URLs look like http://hiphound.com/shop/dog-collars . My DEV site store URLs look like http://hiphound.com/dog-collars . No /shop directory. B. The dev firm installed the rewrite rule below: ############################################ enable rewrites Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on #RedirectMatch 301 ^/shop?/$ http://hiphound.com/ RedirectMatch 301 ^/shop?/$ http://hiphound.com ########################################### C. When I manually enter a URL with /shop in the address the website redirects to the correct page which is good. QUESTIONS I HAVE 1. Is the above redirect correct? I need them to permanent. Don't think the above is right... 2. Will links in the Google index be redirected as well? I am assuming yes but just want to confirm. 3. For each page indexed in Google will its pagerank, etc. be passed to the new page using just the 301 above? 4. Do I need to create addtional 301s for each page? So mapping the old page to the new page? Please advise. The goal here is to of course preserve the rankings of the pages already in the Google index. THANK YOU!!! Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0 -
Is a 302 redirect the correct redirect from a root URL to a detail page?
Hi guys The widely followed SEO best practice is that 301 redirects should be used instead of 302 redirects when it is a permanent redirect that is required. Matt Cutts said last year that 302 redirects should "only" be used for temporary redirects. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more For a site that I am looking at the SEO Moz Crawll Diagnostics tool lists as an issue that the URL / redirects to www.abc.com/Pages/default.aspx with a 302 redirect. On further searching I found that on a Google Support forum (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=276539078ba67f48&hl=en) that a Google Employee had said "For what it's worth, a 302 redirect is the correct redirect from a root URL to a detail page (such as from "/" to "/sites/bursa/"). This is one of the few situations where a 302 redirect is preferred over a 301 redirect." Can anyone confirm if it is the case that "a 302 redirect is the correct redirect from a root URL to a detail page"? And if so why as I haven't found an explanation. If it is the correct best practice then should redirects of this nature be removed from displaying as issues in the SEO Moz Crawll Diagnostics tool Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | CPU0