Redirecting site pages is one of the most important activities that SEO experts and website designers are forced to do during a project; Sometimes to improve and sometimes to improve performance.
For example, today you may post a blog post that is very important to you, and 6 months later, due to a change in strategy, this page will lose its value and other pages will take precedence. In these cases, you have to avoid deleting the post. Use your previous method and transfer your credit, one of which is redirect.
Although many of you who are reading this article know what a redirect is, I need to provide a brief definition of your service redirect in order to maintain the comprehensiveness of this article. A redirect is a way to move an address (URL) to another address. For example, suppose you have multiple pages for a product with the following URLs:
example.com/shop/products/widgets
example.com/shop/products/black-widgets
example.com/shop/products/red-widgets
Now, if you no longer intend to sell this product or you want to merge the pages, you can use redirect for this purpose.
This will help you organize your site and help you optimize your workforce and budget, and instead of focusing on a few pages, focus on a specific page to achieve better results in less time.
For this purpose, you can use different types of redirects such as redirect 301-redirect 302 – redirect 307 and redirect 308 and optimize your redirection by using content updates, new meta descriptions, etc. Any redirect you use can be beneficial to your site traffic and affect your site traffic and ranking. Therefore, when doing a redirect, be careful not to make the following mistakes:
Reading the article “Comprehensive guide to get acquainted with Google and eliminate penalties” is recommended to you dear ones.
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Redirect all additional pages on the home page
Massive redirects to the home page as an attempt to rank in some keywords will hit your site infrastructure and SEO more than it is useful to your site.
“Redirecting a large number of old pages to the home page will erase the signal of previous content,” said John Mueller, Google’s senior expert.
This will eventually cause problems for your site and will be considered a red light for Google crawlers. Google will lose all the positive signals it got from your old pages with your wrong redirect.
Redirect loop
Redirect loop is another common error that often occurs on large sites with many pages and products.
By redirect loop I mean something similar to what you see below:
Page 1 -> Page 2 -> Page 3 -> Page 1
In this redirect model, the user starts from one page and returns to the first page after several redirects, which of course occurred on the server side. This, of course, is the path that the reptile takes and will eventually cause problems.
The mistake that can easily get your claim denied is to fail.
Making a redirect as a chain
If you want to destroy your user experience altogether and reduce the ranking of your website, one of the best ways to do this is to create a chain of redirects and move the crawler and the user from page to page.
To better understand this, look at the following example:
/about is redirected to /about-us
/about-us is redirected to /our-company
/our-company is redirected to /about-our-company
In addition to slowing down the site, this will also increase your bounce rate.
Lack of attention to case sensitivity
I will illustrate this error with an example:
You can have an “about” or “About” page if you wish. Because if someone types in your web address in the browser, they probably won’t remember what you used to say.
Most people keep the URL in lower case though.
Of course, there are many ways to redirect, but many people use htaccess servers on Apache servers. Using the “NC” parameter when using RewriteRule is one way to help eliminate letter-sensitive issues.
For example, you can redirect the following page without minor sensitivity using the following:
Redirect 301 /about http://www.domain.com/about-new [NC]
So if the phrase “about” is searched by the user “About”, all these phrases will be redirected to your home page without any problems and the user will not get a 404 error.
Use 302 redirect instead of 301 redirect
Unfortunately, some people are not aware of the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect!
When to use 301 redirect?
When you want to transfer the credibility and nature of one page completely and permanently to another page, you should use 301 redirect. This will not destroy the SEO position of your page and only the first page will be removed from the search engine index list and its credibility will be transferred to the second page.
When do we do a 302 redirect?
By redirecting to 302, you are giving Google the following message:
Hello Google! I have temporarily moved this page to another page and will be back soon. By doing this, you have not transferred the page credit and you have maintained the original page page rank.
So what do you do now?
Use a 302 redirect if you want to get back to your home page very soon, but use a 301 redirect if you want to move a whole page from your site to another page.
Important Note: If you use the 302 change for a long time, the Google search engine may consider it a 301 redirect.
Lack of redirect monitoring
If you have an old site, hundreds or thousands of pages, or have worked with a large number of SEO professionals, you need to create detailed protocols to track changes to your site.
Why?
You need a number of criteria to track the changes made so that you can monitor the changes in your site and check your analysis.
Because redirects can be done at the page or server level, periodic follow-up of these changes is essential.
You may open your .htaccess file, not see the redirect of a particular page, and assume that one of the changes is out of place.
Redirect tracking helps SEOs become fully aware of common redirection problems that can affect your site traffic and revenue. You should also have protocols that need to be tested and approved for all new redirects to ensure that they work properly.