Redirect Chain: A Hidden Danger for Your SEO
Highlights: Imagine you want to visit a store in a shopping mall. To get there, you follow the signs. However, you keep getting directed to different places. Eventually, you’ll become confused and give up. That’s what visitors to your website might experience when they encounter a redirection chain. Let’s dive deeper into this topic, starting from understanding what a redirection chain is, to how to address it to prevent harm to your website’s SEO. What is a Redirection Chain? When there’s more than one redirect between the URL clicked or intended by the user and the final page successfully accessed, it’s called a redirection chain. For example, when you click a URL, you’d normally be directed straight to the destination page. However, with a redirection chain, you might be redirected to page A, then to page B, before finally reaching the intended destination page. How Do Redirect Chains Occur? In SEO practice, the most commonly used types of redirections are 301 and 302 redirects. A 301 redirect is used when you want to permanently redirect a URL to a new one. A 302 redirect is used for temporary redirects to a new URL, usually when you intend to make changes to the original page. Redirection chains can occur when you: How Do Redirection Chains Affect SEO? Remember the purpose of implementing SEO strategies. Your efforts are likely related to user experience and search engine experience. Search engines like Google always emphasize that they value good user experience. When redirection chains occur on your website, several issues may arise: These issues can damage the good relationship you’ve built with users and search engines. As a result, the SEO strategy you’ve carefully implemented on your website could be ruined by redirection chains. How to Identify Redirection Chains on Your Website To identify redirection chains on your website, you could manually check each page if you have spare time. However, if you’re looking for a practical way without spending too much time, there are solutions! You can use online tools like redirect checkers to help you identify redirection chains on your website. The most commonly used tools include: Strategies to Address Redirection Chains and Improve SEO Actually, addressing redirection chains isn’t as complicated as it might seem. The process becomes very easy if you have a list of all URLs with redirection chains. You just need to break the chain by updating the redirection in the initial URL. Direct the initial page using a 301 redirect to the final destination page. This way, there won’t be more than one redirection. Example of Eliminating a Redirection Chain Suppose URL A is redirected to URL B. Later, that URL is redirected again to URL C. If this happens again, it could even reach URL D. What you need to do is replace or update the redirection of URL A, which previously pointed to URL B, to now point directly to URL C (or URL D if applicable). Meanwhile, the redirection on URL B can be maintained to URL C. After doing this, the redirection chain will be eliminated, and your SEO performance is expected to return to normal or potentially improve. However, if you still face some challenges or obstacles when solving this problem, feel free to chat with our SEO consultants. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
