Redirect Issues

Redirect issues include temporary redirects, redirect chains, and meta refreshes. These all have an impact on user experience (and crawlability), and therefore also impact SEO.

Why does it matter for SEO?

Temporary redirects, or 302s/307s, divert users from one URL to another. Think of these redirects like a road construction detour — the user can’t go this route today, but eventually, they will be able to use this route. That’s how Google sees these temporary redirects and because of that, they don’t pass as much link equity (ranking power) to the page — which is not ideal! Especially if you're planning on never opening that old road (or URL) back up and the “detour” is actually the new route.

Redirect chains are exactly what they sound like — a redirect from one page to another that redirects to another page and so on. The problem with this is that it takes a few seconds for every redirect to load on the user side. Oh, and let’s not forget that, again, Google is dropping link equity at every stop, so by the time there've been a few redirects, a good amount of equity has been lost. Plus, when a chain is too long, Google's crawler will no longer attempt to reach the final page. That means your page won't make it into the index, and you've lost an opportunity to rank.

Meta refreshes are made in the HTML code and tell the server to redirect the user after a certain amount of time. This can be very confusing for the user and lead them to leave the site. Moreso, these redirects pass no link equity.

Getting the dev perspective

As we've said before, it's important to understand why a decision was made before you can find an effective way to fix it. Figure out why your developers chose to use certain redirects, and make sure to communicate with them why one decision is better than another. If they have a regular process in place for implementing redirects, see where you can fit into that process and provide insight.

Fixing redirect issues with your web developer

When working with your web devs on redirect issues, there are a few key points to get across:

Load times. Page speed is a ranking factor, and the longer a user (and a search engine) waits for a page to load, the more ranking power that page loses. User experience. The longer a user waits for the target page to appear, the more likely they'll bounce away and head to a competitor. That affects traffic, engagement metrics, and eventually revenue. Crawling and indexing. Your devs have worked hard to support and maintain the website, and the last thing they want is for that work to be for nothing. Redirect issues can keep pages from being crawled and indexed, which means they might as well not exist at all.

To identify the redirects on your site, navigate to the Redirect Issues section of your Site Crawl, download the CSV file, determine and prioritize what needs fixing, and get to work.

The HTTP Status Code and Performance and Page Speed sections of the Web Dev SEO Cheat Sheet will be helpful here, so make sure to share it with your devs!