What is a redirect chain? A redirect chain occurs when your site redirects to a final destination URL that has already been redirected. Are you confused? Search engines too! Do not worry!
Let’s see a brief explanation of the URL redirect chain, along with some 301 redirect status codes:
Page A —> Page B —> Page C
Redirect loops happen when you redirect an original 301 URL C to URL B, where URL B has already been redirected to URL A. (URL A can also be redirected before that, redirects from HTTP to HTTPS also count in this context.) Now you may be wondering why URL redirect chains are considered a problem.
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3 Reasons to Eliminate Redirect Chains
1- Multiple redirects cause crawling problems
Anything that confuses Google’s search engine bots is generally considered a bad thing. The redirect loop falls into the category of bad things.
Because there is a chance that the Google bots will not bother trying to find the final page of a redirect chain. The longer a chain takes to reach the final page, the worse it will be for your site to be crawled and indexed. John Mueller from Google staff suggests that there should be less than 5 redirects in a chain to reach the destination URL, because if there are more than this number, Google will not go to the final URL. So if you don’t trust us, at least trust John Mueller!
Don’t forget to read the digital marketing article to learn about another digital marketing channel!
Do not forget that the longer it takes to be indexed, the worse it will affect your ranking. (Redirect loops reduce Link Juice and overall web page speed)
2- Multiple redirects slow down the loading speed of your site
Optimum website loading speed is a principle to achieve a great user experience. A great user experience leads to great SEO. This means that your goal should be to eliminate everything that hurts the loading speed of your site. Redirect chains are one of these negative factors that you should eliminate.
Actually; Pingdom emphasizes that redirects can have a huge impact on site loading speed. To prove this claim, we did a little experiment that you can do too. Just go to Pingdom and enter your main domain.
3- Backlinks
There is a lot of valuable SEO debate going on in the world about whether backlinks equal 100% of redirects. In our opinion, this issue is not very important because it is common sense. Why maintain a redirect chain when it has no positive results for your SEO efforts? They seem to hurt your site far more than they help it.
Now that you know the 3 reasons to remove redirect chains, it’s time to see how to find them.
How to find redirect chains
The best way to find redirect chains is to use Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider. Just open Screaming Frog and enter your domain.
In this section, you will know if you have a redirect chain or not. If you don’t have one, great! If you have, you should do the following.
How to make redirect chains
The good news is that repairing redirect chains is very simple.
All you have to do is remove the redirect between page A and page B and then redirect 301 from page A to page C. The result is that both pages A and B give a 301 redirect to the final page C. Just repeat this process for all the redirect chains you have.
There are countless SEO activities you can do, but in our opinion, building redirect chains falls into the “quick wins” category. Because they affect many different elements of SEO (review, indexing, page loading speed, and even site credibility), moreover, fixing this problem is a very simple task.