[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]
Every SEO knows 301 redirects are necessary from time to time. But are they affecting your other optimization efforts by slowing down page load time? Or are they sending bots on a wild goose chase? How many 301s are out there that you don’t need anymore?
Before I jump into this list, let me take you back to where this started: I was in a development meeting for one of our clients. This meeting had nothing to do with SEO. But, as usual, the discussion quickly sparked a few SEO considerations.
This client, a manufacturer of home goods, is particularly sensitive about the load time of their site, and rightfully so. They’ve got a lot of hi-resolution imagery on their site; therefore, every possible measure to minimize load time must be taken.
One of the proposed initiatives to cut load time was removing all 301 redirects. That got my attention.
There was no way I was going to let that happen. I knew some of their redirects were necessary for — well, scratch that. I wasn’t sure how valuable they were or how many people were hitting them. I had no quantitative data to support my position.
I convinced them to leave all redirects in place until a viable solution was put in place. I obviously needed to collect some data to demonstrate how important 301 redirects can be. But how was I going to identify which ones needed to stay?
I wanted a solution that would provide the data in a format that we (as the marketers/analysts) could easily access without stepping on the toes of development or IT.
Google Analytics was the obvious choice. As I was hashing out the solution for the redirect removal conundrum (details on this in No. 3 below), I noticed several other items that were affecting the load time of this site: internal links pointing to outdated URLs (which had then been 301’ed) and rel=canonicals with 301’ed URLs.
Basically, every redirect-related issue that could exist did.
After fixing these issues, we were able to effectively decrease the redirection time of the site.
The development team was stoked, the SEO team was excited that our (necessary] 301s got to stay, and the client was thrilled with load time.
These changes were put into place between July and August of 2015. I think the results speak for themselves:
Here are the four ways redirects could be hurting your SEO efforts:
1. You have redirect chains
2. Your internal linking steps through redirects
3. You have unnecessary 301s
4. You have canonical tags that 301
1. You have redirect chains
Let’s start out with a simple definition: A redirect chain is a series of redirects that go from one URL after another, forcing people and search engines to wait until there are no more redirects to step through. Here’s an example: www.mysite.com/responsive redirects to www.mysite.com/responsive-web-design, which then redirects to www.mysite.com/rwd.
Of course, we all know the implication this has on passing authority. For every step in a redirect chain, about 10% of authority is lost. But it’s also important to acknowledge how this would drastically increase page load time and decrease the overall quality of your site. A standard single-step redirect is already having an impact on your load time, then add to that the fact that some redirects may be going through multiple iterations just to call one URL.
It's no surprise that 301s stack up over time and create these chains: You put in this redirect, your coworker adds another, and a few months later you stack another one on top. These things happen.
So how do you identify these chains? Luckily, our friends at Screaming Frog have built ridiculously simple feature into their tool that tracks down redirect chains and outputs them in a report. Here's how to use it:
- Run a full site crawl with Screaming Frog
- Go to > Reports > Redirect Chains
That’s it. Seriously.
Analyzing which ones you need to fix is slightly more involved than pulling the report. The only thing that makes this more difficult is the fact that ALL of the links on your site are factored in. This means that if you link out to another site and they’ve got a chain in place, it finds that as well (see red highlighting in the screenshot below). One of the common themes of URL types I’ve seen here is social sharing URLs; they change frequently, so they’ll need to be filtered out of the report. In column B, identify your own domain (see green highlighting) and remove all the other rows.
Once this is done, it’s pretty smooth sailing and you can update your 301 redirects to remove those unnecessary steps. Don’t send them to your dev or IT team yet, though. Keep reading for more useful nuggets.
2. Your internal linking steps through redirects
The second way redirects could be hurting your SEO efforts is via internal links pointing to URLs that are redirected elsewhere.
To get a handle on what's going on with your site, follow these simple tips:
- Visit the Google Search Console and download the full list of your internal links.
- Go to Search Traffic > Internal Links and click the "Download this Table" button. Once you’ve done that, open the doc and use the concatenate function in Excel to append your domain to the beginning of those URL strings.
Once you have that column of your full URLs, copy the whole list. Here's how to use that clipboard info to populate a crawl in Screaming Frog:
- In the menu bar, go to "Mode" and change it to "List." Then, click "Upload List" and "Paste." This will run a crawl of only the URLs from the Internal Link report.
- Once complete, check the status code column for any 301s. If you see any, select that URL and go to the Inlinks tab in the lower left of Screaming Frog. This will show you all the pages that contain a link to that redirecting URL.
Once you’ve identified all redirecting internal links, get your list together for updates to send over to your development team.
3. You have unnecessary 301 redirects
Websites tend to collect 301 redirects over the years, and no one really thinks to clean them up. When your .htaccess file starts to run deep with redirects, your load time suffers. Each time a URL is called by a browser, every single one of those redirects is checked to see if the requested URL needs to be sent elsewhere. The absolutely kills your load time.
But how do you identify which of those redirects are actually needed? UTM tags, that’s how.
By appending UTMs to the resolving URLs of redirects, you can easily identify which 301 redirects are actually used on a regular basis.
Here’s an example of the tagging methodology I use:
/old-page >>> /new-page?utm_medium=301&utm_source=direct&utm_campaign=/old-page
This will send data to Google Analytics every time someone hits one of your redirects and give it the attribution information you’ve included in your UTMs.
Download a Google Sheet with my tag generator. To save it locally, go to File > Download As > Microsoft Excel (.xlsx).
Twice a year, I’ll go into Google Analytics and view the Source/Medium Report and apply an in-line filter for 301s.
From here, simply pull a list of redirects that were triggered and compare that to the list of 301s in the .htaccess file. Any that weren’t hit should get removed.
Side note: If you run an e-commerce site, you can demonstrate the importance of 301 redirects by showing how much revenue was saved by having redirects in place.
4. You have canonical tags that 301
The logic behind this one requires little explanation, as it’s basically the same as having redirect chains. You don’t want to have canonical tags that point to redirected URLs. To identify these canonical tags, run your Screaming Frog crawl and go to the Directives tab. Scroll to the right to find the "Canonical Link Element 1" column and copy the list.
Re-crawl using List Mode and find any that have a Status of 301.
Bonus: Regaining links via 301s
If you have a large site, or your site has had a few URL structural changes over the years, chances are pretty good you’ve got some decent links pointing to a dead URL.
Run an Open Site Explorer report and grab the list of target URLs.
Drop that list into Screaming Frog using the same "Upload List" method described above. If you see any errors in the Status Code column, 301 redirect the URLs. (Make certain to check the stats and quality of those links first.)
Join in the conversation below if you have other redirect-related issues to add to this list, or other methods for identifying and troubleshooting these problems.
You don't need to use the utm tags, any query string will do the trick.
As already pointed out, the utm Google Analytics tags would kill the original referring source
Instead use something such as &301=yes and then look at these in Google Analytics
Don't forget to tell Bing and Google to ignore the query string
That's a great point that I hadn't thought of. Thanks for chiming in with that!
Excellent suggestion, yes. Many thanks. Didn't really want to go down the utm route.
Thanks for sharing Logan, this is very common issue faced by many and as above they used to do the same kind of mistakes.
301's, the unsung hero of the competitor when used improperly. Nice article.
Hi Logan,
Nice article!
One thing! There's a much easier way to identify and export all of your internally redirected links that what you have described under '2. Your internal linking steps through redirects'.
After you've run your Screaming Frog crawl, go to Bulk Exports > Response Codes > Redirection (3xx) Inlinks
That spreadsheet will show you the page source and redirecting URL of all redirected links picked up in the crawl!
Cheers,
David
Hi David,
Thanks for the tip, it definitely tightens up the process. But that report doesn't show where the destination URL redirects to. They can easily get that data, seems odd that they wouldn't include it in the report.
Thank you for the article and all the advices. I'm going to bookmark and follow the steps.
I've installed the Screaming Frog but I know I 'm not taking full advantage of it. So much to learn... and very little time.
The good people over at Seer Interactive have put together a really good Screaming Frog guide, you should take some time and go through it.
This guide will be very useful to me. Thank you, Logan!
Thanks for this helpful article! Currently on our site we temporarily redirect some search queries to specific pages. I never thought about using utm codes for these 301 redirects.
You're welcome! I hope it's helpful in your decision making and strategy!
For the step 2 (internal linking steps through redirects), what I usually do is that I crawl my website with Screaming Frog, go to the Response Codes tab and select the Redirection filter. I then have a list of all redirected URLs found on my website by the crwaler. For every URL, I look at the Inlinks tab (at the bottom of the window when a URL is selected) and fix all internal links pointing to 301'd URL. Hope that hepls!
That's a great solution for small scale internal linking updates. I often find that this can be a tedious method if you've recently taken on a new client that has this problem on a much larger scale.
I have researched the importance of 301's and how the affect your site, but not on this level. Great job breaking down the science of all the different areas. I think that the approach utilizing GA is a great way to really see which ones you need. In the past I would just use as many as needed but never really thought about tracking them and seeing which ones just simply were not needed.
I also liked the e-commerce note on showing the revenue with the 301's implemented. The data never lies so doing that you can get your point across greatly. Thank you for this and it is something I plan on sharing with my team.
Glad you enjoyed it! That revenue piece really helped validate the temporary need for 301s with the client and our dev team.
UTM tags, very simple and effective solution to detect 301's traffic. Thanks for this post! ;)
Excellent info about cleaning up 301 redirects! Thanks for all of the detail.
But I don't understand at all why do I have to use a 301 redirect... Can you give me a little orientation please?
Great Information! 301 redirection is very complicated issue every website owners face. Now this post will be surely helpful for them.. Just one question, if we redirect a page (A) to another new page (B), in case page authority and link juice will pass to the new page?
Hi Mohd! A 301 redirect will carry most (data shows about 90%) of the authority and link juice with it.
Thank you so much for posting this article. I currently have a client who has multiple errors regarding their 301 redirects and this article will help tremendously when explaining why correcting the 301 errors is a crucial task.
A great and timely article for me Logan. Currently working on a web product migration which has multiple domains (split by regions - co.uk, .fr, .au etc etc). The main URL (.com) has a great domain ranking score while the other brand related unique domains don't. Looking to tidy to the domain/URL structures to bring them all under the one URL .com brand (e.g .com/UK, .com/France, .com/Australia) but was afraid to lose any current referral or direct traffic.
So naturally was thinking to redirect the old URL's. However, by changing the entire structure there would be a lot of them. This article has certainly given me plenty to think about. Many many thanks.
thanks for sharing ! team, WebsiteFix
Uff, redirecting, i have lots of head pain everytime i deal with a redirection, great article, i´m going to use it right now, but i have to tell i´m to lazy to start looking for all my missing links and content.
Going through this exercise of identifying all 301's found on any site is thoughtfully constructed here - and thanks for this excellent post, I was able to convince the company to pick up a full copy of Screaming Frog to conduct this activity. Now, anyone want to write up something similar for Mozcon ?!?!? :-P
That's awesome! Compelling data is always helpful when trying to get purchases approved!
Hi Logan,
It may be cause I've not been much into this deep SEO side, but I didn't even knew that it should be done by me hahahaha. I'm denifinitely going to save this post and get more info about it. The most you know, the highest your value is! Thank you so much for sharing with us :D
Inmobiliaria mallorca? Nice to meet you. i live in Madrid and i am a freelance seo ;)
Fantastic article!
Perfectly timed as I have been going through 301 redirect reform with my team. They used to download all the crawl errors (404 not found pages) that Google Search Console reports and 301 redirect them to pages that are related (providing better user experience).
However, I questioned this activity in my transition as SEO manager. Most best practices are not a blind application to all issues that arise, and special attention is needed when addressing each situation if you want the most rewarding outcome. I demanded more of a quality approach after reading several studies (and now yours) about the proper use of redirects. We now look at similar metrics to what you have listed as well as backlink profiles of old pages that are being redirected. Sometime it is easier (or the only option) to redirect those pages then to try and update the URL. Tutorials like this article are very helpful, thank you!
Using Screaming Frog we were able to locate 301 redirects we were not aware of. The darn WordPress author tag link was by far the biggest culprit! Also, Instagram recently added the "www" to their URLs, so we fixed up all those external 301's as well.
Hi Logan,
I had another ah-ha moment when reading this post... I hadn't considered 301s being a contributing factor to load time, so thank you! And I'm kicking myself here, because it makes so much sense. I'll be spending some time this week scheduling 301 clean-up activities. This post (like so many others) is a testament to why I spend my time reading The Moz Blog. Thanks to everyone who contributes to these conversations!
Hi Logan, you're raising a good point here. With incorrect usage of 301s you may be creating crawl traps, adding unnecessary loadtime with 301 redirects and you may lose out on link juice. It's something that's easily overlooked, but can have a big positive impact on SEO when handled correctly.
I noticed the process on how to investigate these issues as mentioned in your post. In my opinion it's inefficient and slow. We created an application to do this for you. Our application monitors your website for these (and a lot of other) kind of things happening. I'm really curious what you think of it, considering your background and of course as the author of this post. Are you open to taking it for a spin? Email me on steven [at] becontentking [dot] com, or create an account here directly yourself.
Hi Steven, I took a look at your software and didn't see any features that mentioned redirect related monitoring. Can you please point me in the right direction to learn more about that aspect of your software?
Hey Logan, monitoring redirects is only part of what our monitoring service does. Perhaps we should explain that a bit more on our website (food for thought). In our opinion you should always be on top of things if your website really matters to you. Examples of other things we monitor:
We also keep of track of changes in title's, meta descriptions, headings, canonicals, OpenGraph and TwitterCard markup so you can trace back important changes (and correct these if necessary).
I can set you up with a free account so you can have a look. Giving it a try says more than 1.000 words :)
Nice post Logan!
Adding utm to the 301 urls is useful, but you lose the original referral source. It has to be mentioned :)
In most cases 301 redirects are created to take care of your organic traffic after a migration. So, losing your initial source/medium (in this case: Google, Organic) will prevent the measuring and the correct attribution.
Cheers,
That's a great point, thanks for mentioning that. It's a risk that I believe is worth taking in order to keep the 301 list minimal and manageable.
Agree,
In my opinion the best procedure for a migration is to add utms after a few months (once you are sure that most of your new urls are indexed) to be sure if you can delete the 301 completely.
In your case (performance optimization) it was a perfect idea!
Exactly, that's another great reason to use tags! I've got another client that just went responsive (finally, right?!?) and we've got a ton of m.site.com redirects in place. I'm eagerly awaiting the day when that graph zeroes out so we can get rid of all of those.
Hi Digiteando, so what's the besttime to delete the 301's? Simply when the new URL is indexed? Great post and feedback btw.
Hey Logan, nice post. One quick thing about using parameter tagging to find out which of your redirects are being used.
Digiteando mentioned the corruption of analytics data, which is super important IMHO not to mess with. The other problem with this (and by the way, I wish this would work because it's very clever), is that you end up creating another redirect, which isn't what should happen at all.
For example, if you configure your server to 1:1 redirect /old-page to /new-page?utm_medium=301&utm_source=direct&utm_campaign=/old-page you're going to need a rel canonical to push the authority back to /new-page, that canonical is actually a soft redirect, and works in the same way as a 301, so we'd end up just creating another chain.
I'd advise not doing this ;)
There's a better way, I'll explain shortly but first, on the topic of "too many redirects": well, most servers can handle a LOT of rules these days, and the majority of redirects should just hit a pattern matching rule which the server can recognize fairly early. That being said, it doesn't cover 1:1 redirects where there's no real pattern to match, these suck, and yes, too many of these - say 50,000 individual redirects can definitely create overhead. Let's say that you did have to find old redirects that were 1:1 and they were in the 50k plus range, instead of UTM tagging, you could check your server logs.
If and when these old URLs are out of circulation, you'll see a drop off of requests in your logs - this is the best, cleanest way! Plus, server logs > GA tagging :=)
I noticed you used Screaming Frog, they also have a log analyzer out that is damn good for parsing through server logs quickly: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/log-file-analyser/
Nice post, take it easy.
Dave
CharlesMeadon suggested below to use query strings, which I had never thought of before....funny how I was so close, but didn't see that! It solves the first problem you mentioned, but the canonical issue would still exist. I'll definitely check out the log analyzer in Screaming Frog, thanks for the recommendation!
No query strings either! :)
Hi David,
In Internal linking, can we use parameters at the end of URL to track the traffic from that particular page. Does it dilute the authority of the page between 2 links?
Search Result Page: abc.com/buy-cars/
Individual Listing Page Linking: abc.com/buy-honda-cars-2016?from=search
Actual Page URL: abc.com/buy-honda-cars-2016 (Same URL we have added in canonical tags)
Spot on David, couldn't have said it better myself :)
Thank you for writing this up, we are struggling with how to set up processes around this topic and this post is very helpful. Additional question, would you recommend removing rel='shortlink' from pages handled in WP?
You're welcome Casey! From what I've seen, this tag doesn't have much impact on SEO. So feel free to nix it if you want, but I don't think it'll hurt if you leave it.
Thank you very much for simply explaining how to 301s.
Great advice! Always nice to have my methods backed up by others.
With regards to the unnecessary redirects, what is your view when there isn't enough traffic to get reliable data? One thing I often find is that the htaccess file might be full of outdated redirects from previous site migrations or clean-ups. Many of these will lead to redirect chains. Running the destination URLs through screaming frog will identify where this occurs and where clean-ups can happen. Clever use of regex in redirects is also a must these days.
I am also in the middle of a clean-up where a client has 100s blogs still live from a previous version of the website. Many of these links are broken, which I am currently trying to remove, but many are redirected. Currently,the client is resisting calls to cull most of this content (i'm a little worried about Panda). I am changing these links where I can, but it takes time. Do you see much value in spending hours (well, days actually) fixing redirected links from outdated blogs?
Hi Davey! Glad you enjoyed the article!
Regarding your first question about not having enough data to make a decision: I would say that in lieu of traffic data, use time. If all of your 301s are tracked via UTMs and they go 3/6/12 months (whatever you're comfortable with, time-wise) without being hit, you're probably in the clear to nix them.
Regarding your question about the value of time spent on this: As with most SEO issues, it depends. Mostly it depends on how much traffic the posts get. If they're getting a substantial amount of traffic, it'll most likely pay off. I would work through this list on a descending pageview order so you hit the most visited posts first. That way, if you get tied up with other tasks down the road, you know you've handled the most important broken links.
Hope this is helpful!
Very useful and timely information for me at least.
Thanks Logan,
I still have a case to discuss though.
We are managing a site in which we changed the structure recently. It is an online store. The case is like this.
Earlier xyz.com was a site and xyz.com/store was a store where store was a directory and cms for store was sitting inside.
Later we changed structure and placed store cms in root. we never wanted to change url but the programmer made a mistake and hence urls got changed to xyz.com/abc.html which was earlier xyz.com/store/abc.html which google captured almost instantaneously. We corrected it back to the original one but now google is not getting this URL anyhow for more than a month now. So we are being forced to have 301 and also loosing google ranking.
Any suggestions on this?
Note: Sitemap submitted in webmaster has these urls but still google does not accept that and keeps showing url without store in SERP and webmaster. However analytics as urls with Store.
Strange behavior
Thanks
Prashant
Hey Prashant, glad you found the info useful! It's difficult to advise you on how to handle that without seeing the actual site. If you send me a direct message with the URL I'd be glad to take a quick look and see if there's any glaring issues causing your problem.
Hi Logan - with you on every step of your post (surprised more folks don't know about this topic, actually... I'm always finding clients pretty much universally need help with all of those items you noted...); I did NOT know, however, that GA has an "Avg. Redirection Time" metric", just dug in and reproduced that report you showed in your screenshot... excellent, THANKS!
Glad you were able to find a nugget of info in a topic you are already quite familiar with! It is shocking how frequently these problems come up and how many SEOs/digital marketers don't realize the negative impact they can cause.
Very nice trick to track the 301 in Google Analytics by adding tags in the redirection, but I think log file analysis is more accurate for this kind of task.
Yes, as per David's suggestion, I've been playing around with that. It's great, but not everyone has access to log files so UTMs or query strings used to feed data to GA can still be useful in some cases. I'm also interested to see how data from log files compares to GA data through UTMs.
I use streaming frog software for my client website, its really helpful to extract duplicate content and other aspect of seo. I simply put my post link inside Canonical tab and publish my posts.
I think it too
Nice to meet you
Very Good Information. I was already aware about the 301 redirect but I got some additional info. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for this research it really is helpful article!
Redirections have many times been part of my SEO strategy but I had no idea about using utm codes in 301 redirects, this is first time I came to know about it. Learning new things is always an add-on to your knowledge and this looks one of them.
Regards
Pulkit Thakur
Really nice article,
I'm a newbie SEO and this info is GOLD for me. I know that we've to constantly keep updating our URLS in order to match them with the main keywords (always in a describing way so the customer gets what he's looking for), but it's kinda hard when this 301 redirects happen, so it's always nice to read from someone who gives such good advices on how to do it well.
Thanks a lot!
Nice post, great information. Thanks
Great post Logan. You explained cleaning up 301 redirects in an amazing way. Thanks.
Regards.
That's a very important information that I haven't encountered so far. Thanks very much!
Thank you for great Article...
Actually, I have been facing with different redirection problem, My business is related to web design services, some hackers are redirected their fashion related website to my website. I am unable to resolve this issue. What will happen if the case is like this? I observed seo ranking and traffic drops for my business, is this because of that 301 irrelevant redirection? Is there any bad seo impact to my business with this?
Cloud you please help me to resolve this issue.
Thank You....!!!!
Guia de viajes y turismo? Nice to meet you. i live in Madrid and i am a freelance seo ;)
i love this post , i'm going to bookmark it becasue i´ll use it to improve my website.
thank you
I will use canonical meta tag for my site
This issue not've never taken into account, it might be time to review all redirections see what I can improve.
Thanks for teaching me something new
awesome article, its amazing how the list of 301's builds up over time.
big thanks from the team at Kick Media SEO for your continued great info.
[Link removed by editor.]
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Screaming Frog ... I taught and helped both ...
Nice article
I think it too
Hi Logan,
This is a interesting research work. Much appreciated!
I failed to under the 4th point "Redirect canonical tags that 301".
You said "you don’t want to have canonical tags that point to redirected URLs". What I have understood is - If I am redirecting Page A to Page B, I should not have a self canonical tag on page B.
Or, does it mean something different?
Please let me know.
Hi Ankit,
To use your example where you have page A redirecting to page B, I'm specifically addressing the fact that you shouldn't have any canonical tags that point to page A since they'll be going through a redirect.
Hi Logan
In most cases, 301s are made to properly perform the migration. The remainder, if it may be unnecessary.
Great article !!!
One way to keep a 301 redirect thanks to an essential move, delete and consolidate resource pages .
Is there any possible way to someone share a proper plan of search engine optimization that teach me how its work and what are methodology for search engine Optimiztaion.
Shaman Das Khatri
Neat idea for using UTMs to identify which redirects to keep!
Hi Logan !
Many thanks for this great article. We recently got our website redesigned and as general practice the process of old URL to new on once "301 Redirects " :) were implemented on our website and was wondering why the page load was still high despite keeping a strong check on each aspect of development. Although I could not understand the UTM concept you discussed, yet this article will be a must check point for page load time in all my current and future SEO projects. The tools you have mentioned will be a regular by my team.
Very informative article.
Hi Logan, good afternoon!
well, your client was in problems because of the size of his images! You can tell me, IMHO, to learn how to use tools like compressor.io or photoshop. Size of images is critical to the speed of a website.
Now, I can tell you without a doubt that your article is fascinating, BUT, I'm learning SEO and 301 redirect is a feature that I don't understand at all. At simply words, can you tell me why do someone could need a 301 redirection? :)
Thank you Logan!!!
You can tell him* sorry (about using compressor.io or photoshop to reduce size of images)
Hey Rodrigo, there's a handful of reasons why 301 redirects might be in place:
There are plenty of other reasons, I've stuck to the most compelling reasons here. Hope that's helpful!
Thank You very much Logan !! Now I have a good idea from this! :)
Nice to read it. but i think that there is a plugin for it. but i dont remember the plugin. sorry. i will search it.
God job!!
Like others, I am going to bookmark this and return. We are in the process of a major re-launch and using an external development company for pretty much all of it, including all our technical SEO.
I joined the company at the back-end of the project so have not had chance to influence it as much as I would like, so I'm going to have to do these tasks post launch. Thanks for the share, these are super useful tips!
Hi Logan! Very useful information! Thanks a lot <3
Thanks Logan, really interesting and from what I see many people share this opinion. I have been concerned till now about the link juice being lost with 301s but had not considered the impact on speed load time. So we´ll need to run a mini internal 301´s audit to see to what extent we have an issue or (hopefully) not.
Suggestion #3 here, "you have unnecessary 301 redirects" is fundamentally a very good idea but perhaps it could have benefitted from a little more nuance. I don't totally agree that whether or not a 301 has been recorded in Google Analytics determines its necessity, especially on websites with less than a couple thousand pages. If you already have relatively few redirects (less than 1k), it ain't broke, so don't bother fixing it.
First of all, not all directives in an .htaccess file are equal—so the efficiency of the directives in the file will rather clearly affect your server's performance. E.g., you could write one directive, have a very small .htaccess file, and still produce several thousand 301s. Also, there are other ways to speed up that process beyond just "get rid of it because nobody visited it in Google Analytics during [time range]." The last response here in this old thread has some decent insight in that respect.
Also, in lieu of evidence that the server actually is lagging, checking the visited 301s in Google Analytics seems like an unnecessary optimization exercise. Not to mention you might be killing the value of old links with that approach. Let's say you have a good bit of inbound links from old news articles... just because nobody's clicking through those links anymore doesn't mean you should just drop them. And I wouldn't use Open Site Explorer as your only data for your inbound link profile either. It's a pretty small index. It's definitely the first one I go to, but you need to supplement it with some other sources like Majestic, Search Console data, Ahrefs, etc.
I like you both trick to manage redirection and its nice to know that scream frog providing the opportunity to find a chain of redirected URLs.I tried it & its working perfectly for analytics and scream frog tool. Lots of doubts have been cleared today to manage 301 redirection.
Thanks for this great article! Already helped me. I wish you many more great articles
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Thank you
To move your site from other domain to new permanently 301 Redirect is best option.
Great post. I will start following 301 redirect tips immediately.
Thanks for this great article! Already helped me)
Great information.. this article is very helpful for seo point of view.
That's awesome!!! Compelling data is always helpful when trying to get purchases approved!!
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