Multiple Consecutive 301 Redirects

What it is the impact of multiple consecutive 301 redirections?

[BaoGab]

Hi,

I have to redirect more than 50000 URLs twice in a row. But I'm concerned by loosing indexation value with search engines if I do both in a short period time.

The first URLs changes will occur in June and the second one in August.

My idea is to apply 301 redirections to accomplish it.

What's your opinion on it?

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, BaoGab.

In my experience, it looks like backlink influence of any kind is only passed after a single 301 redirect, and not through a chain of multiple redirects.

[g1smd]

Multiple redirects can cause many problems.

You are redirecting to a URL that does not exist, and then that "URL" issues another redirect.

If the second redirect does not kick in, then you have a "hanging redirect", that is, a redirect from one URL that issues a 301 response, to another URL that issues a 404 response.

I can only see that as causing problems, especially if the 404 page hasn't been set up correctly in any way, and especially if it emits some other code than 404 on access.

Redirect to the final destination in just one move. If you have to re-point the redirection at some later date then so be it, but again, go from source to destination in just one move. Of course you can have multiple sources that point to a single destination. just make sure that each starting point has only one hop to reach the canonical URL.

[Bambarbia]

URL1 (301)-> URL2 (301)-> URL3 (HTTP 200 Ok)-> The Page

The Page will be indexed.
URL1 or URL3 will be associated with a Page, depends on how Google implements their algorithms.

1. URL1 <-> Page
Pros: do not need to handle Session IDs for dynamic sites (which use redirect if browser does not support session cookies)
Good for: in-site (constrained) crawl (only internal redirects)
Cons: bad for external redirects; easy to steal content and PR from any site

2. URL3 <-> Page
Pros: good to prevent stealing of external content; can penalize URL1
Cons: bad for internal redirects (session IDs, moved pages, etc.)

I believe this is obvious, and Google follows the same logic. Unfortunately some other spiders do not follow 301/302 at all.

And each algorithm has some constraints like as:
- limit of redirects = 10 (some programming frameworks have default setting 100)
- throw away circular redirects

[g1smd]

That is a redirection chain.

You need to set it up so that you get from URL 2 to URL 3 in just one move, and you get from URL 1 to URL 3 in just one move.

[BaoGab]

Thanks for your help!

Here's the process and other questions ...

1st redirections _____________________

URLs1a --301--> URLs2a
URLs1b --301--> URLs2b
URLs1c --301--> URLs2c
URLs1d --301--> URLs2d
...
__________________________________

Two months after the 301 redirections on the URLs1 [ to URLs2 ], what do you think of redirecting old URLs1 and URLs2 to URLs3?

2nd redirections___2 months after_

URLs1a --301--> URLs3a <--301-- URLs2a
URLs1b --301--> URLs3b <--301-- URLs2b
URLs1c --301--> URLs3c <--301-- URLs2c
URLs1d --301--> URLs3d <--301-- URLs2d
...
__________________________________

Is two month to short to be correctly indexed by search engines?

Will we loose URLs seniority value or will it be pass to the URLs3 with two close redirections?

Thanks again!

[tedster]

It would be best just to go to the final redirect state in one step -- but I notice you said that "I have to..' so... If the domain is frequently spidered and has signs of good trust, two months is probably OK for the first stage to shake out properly.

Do you need to redirect every url? When I've helped with major restructuring projects, I usually do a study to identify the best ranking urls and the ones that have good backlinks -- and I just redirect those. I let the rest of the legacy urls return 404, and then Google spiders the domain via the new url scheme. They quickly find the new pages and sort it all out pretty quickly. Never had a ranking problem this way, but I never tried to do a two-step process the way you say you must, either.

Remember, Google does watch your history. You may be in for a rocky patch after the second step because it just looks funny and they need to check it out a bit more.

I would be most focused on that big picture and less on losing a small amount of traffic that might land on a backwater url. However you go about the change, there are a lot of technical pitfalls. So be sure you really nail each new release the first time. Use a staging area and test the daylights out of each new version before you go live with it.

[Bambarbia]

Why do you need redirections anyway?

Possibly, but not all:

1. To redirect Users to a new page. This is probably a must if you have a lot of users and you have significant changes.

301 Moved Permanently. Not the best solution...
200 Ok. Much preferable is to have "autorefresh" in HTML HEAD, or JavaScript, and a link in a body, with detailed description "We have moved! Please click the link if your browser won't redirect during 10 seconds"

2. To redirect Google to a new page.
This is specific... If you have a lot of existing pages (and their URLs!) in Google, you will want to use 301. Also, you need it to redirect PageRank.
But... Google is very fast, and you can submit Sitemaps too. And PageRank can be forwarded via simple HTML links.

3. To handle Session ID. Not applicable in your case...

Of course, URL1->URL2->URL3 is bad. Preferable is URL1->URL3 and URL2->URL3 (in case of 301 solution).

[BaoGab]

One more question:

What are the tools that you use to create Google sitemaps with a large number of urls? More than 50000 for instance.

Thanks!