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
-
How to change 302 redirect from http to https
Hi gang. Our site currently has a 302 redirect from the HTTP version of the homepage to the HTTPS version of the homepage. I understand this really should be changed to a 301 redirect but I'm having a little trouble figuring out exactly how this should be done. Some places on the internet are telling me I can edit our htaccess file to specify the type of redirect, however our htaccess file seems to be missing some of the information in theirs. Can anyone tell me what needs to be changed in the htaccess file - or if there's a simpler way to change the 302 to a 301? Many thanks 🙂 htaccess: BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] END WordPress EXPIRES CACHING ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 6 months" ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days" EXPIRES CACHING
Technical SEO | | davedon0 -
Redirect effecting ranking?
I manage the SEO for several different regions which are also based on the same site e.g. example.com/au, example.com/us The /us site has pretty good rankings and changes I'm making to the site are having an impact. The /au site has really bad rankings, even though much of the content is the same. (The /uk site is also awful but we had an issue with 4,500 duplicate pages which were only resolved last week). Crawl diagnostics are only showing 1 major error for a 404 response, I'm receiving a domain authority of 43 and A grade page ranking for some of our targeted keywords. I could believe that this isn't necessarily going to get us a top 10 rating but I would have thought we would be in the top 50, especially for branded keywords. Could the lack of ranking be to do with how our domain redirects? If you go to example.com.au you are taken to the home page rather than being redirected to example.com/au. Once you head to an internal page the URL changes to example.com/au/page
Technical SEO | | ahyde0 -
Direct link vs 302 redirect
So we have recently relaunched a site that we manage. As part of this we have changed the domain. The webdesign agency that built the new site have implemented a direct link from the old domain to the new domain. What is best practice a direct link or a 302 redirect? Thanks
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
301 Redirect Help
How would you 301 redirect and entire folder to a specific file within the same domain? Scenario www.domain.com/folder to www.domain.com/file.html Thanks for your Input...
Technical SEO | | dhidalgo11 -
302 to 301 redirect
Our site has quite a few 302 redirects that really ought to be 301's. Our IT department is really busy so the question is, given that the 302's have probably been in place for years, is it worth changing them to 301's now? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
Redirect or not to redirect
We are rebuilding a website and try to get rid of errors. The content remains exactly the same but we correct the code and make it load faster. The site has quite many backlinks and I can't decide whether to remove .html endings from the urls and 301 redirect to the new ones or leave them with the older ending. If I remove the endings how much of the link juice will be passed? Anyone any idea?
Technical SEO | | sesertin0 -
Domain Redirect Issues
Hi, I have a domain that is 10 years old, this is the old domain that used to be the website for the company. The company approximately 7 years ago was bought by another and purchased a new domain that is 7 years old. The company did not do a 301 redirect as they were not aware of the SEO implications. They continued building web applications on the old domain while using the new domain for all marketing and for business partner links. They just put in a server level redirect on the folders themselves to point to the new root. I am on Tomcat, I do not have the option of a 301 redirect as the web applications are all hard coded links (non-relative) (hundreds of thousands of dollars to recode) After beginning SEO; Google is seeing them as the same domain, and has replaced all results in Google with the old domain instead of the new one..... My questions is.... Is it better to take the hit and just put a robots.txt to disallow all robots on the old domain Or... Will that hurt my new domain as well since Google is seeing them as the same? Or.... Has Google already made the switch without a redirect to see these as the same and i should just continue on? (even the cache for the new site shows the old domain address) Old Domain= www.floridahealthcares.com New = www.fhcp.com *****Update after writing this I began changing index.htm to all non relative links so all links on the old domain homepage would point to fhcp.com fixing the issue of the entire site being replicated under the old domain. I think this might "Patch" my issue, but i would still love to get the opinion of others Thanks Shane
Technical SEO | | Jinx146780 -
Query String Redirection
In PHP, I'm wanting to store a session variable based upon a link that's clicked. I'm wanting to avoid query strings on pages that have content. My current workaround is to have a link with query strings to a php file that does nothing but snags the variables via $_GET, stores them into $_SESSION, and then redirects. For example, consider this script, that I have set up to force to a mobile version. Accessed via something like a href="forcemobile.php?url=(the current filename)" session_start(); //Location of vertstudios file on your localhost. Include trailing slash $loc = "http://localhost/web/vertstudios/"; //If GET variable not defined, this page is being accessed directly. //In that case, force to 404 page. Same case for if mobile session variable //not defined. if(!(isset($_GET["url"]) && isset($_SESSION["mobile"]))){ header("Location: http://www.vertstudios.com/404.php"); exit(); } //Snag the URL $url = $_GET["url"]; //Set the mobile session to true, and redirect to specified URL $_SESSION["mobile"] = true;header("Location: " . $loc . $url); ?> Will this circumvent the issue caused by using query strings?
Technical SEO | | JoeQuery0