Highlights:
- Redirection chains can decrease your website’s SEO performance.
- Common SEO tools like Screaming Frog can be used to detect redirection chains.
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:
- Perform Website Migration
Website migration might be done with good intentions. Perhaps you want to enhance your website’s security by changing HTTP to HTTPS, or you want to change domains to expand your business. Redirection chains can appear when you don’t update existing redirections and instead create new 301 redirects for the same URLs. - Create Unaware Double Redirections
Redirections aren’t easily detected by the human eye. Therefore, you might not realize that a URL you want to redirect already has another redirection page. This can also lead to redirection chains.
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:
- Slowing Down Indexing
Before search engines like Google can index your website pages, they need to crawl them. The more redirection chains accumulate, the longer Google needs to crawl, resulting in slower indexing times. Additionally, you might waste crawl budget as Google’s robots need to visit each page in the chain. - Reducing Website Performance
Redirection chains require multiple steps, moving from page A to B to C, and possibly even to D. This can affect and slow down your website’s speed. Therefore, the more redirection chains you have, the slower your website becomes. - Losing Page Authority
It’s not uncommon to get backlinks from reputable websites. These backlinks can be vitamins for your website and help improve its ranking in SERPs. When a URL has only one redirection, the final destination URL receives 100% of the authority from the previous page. However, if there’s more than one redirection, the final destination URL won’t receive 100% of the authority.
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:
- Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog can help simplify the process of identifying redirection chains on your website. This tool is available for free with a crawling limit of 500 URLs. If you have a small website, this tool might be suitable for you. - Sitebulb
Using Sitebulb, you can identify redirection chains with its reporting feature that shows website crawl quality evaluation, existing redirect issues, and link distribution within the website. This tool offers a 14-day free trial. - Redirect-checker.org
This free online tool can be used if you want to check specific URLs. It’s less effective if you have a website with many pages and frequent redirections.
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)
- What is meant by redirection?
Redirection is a notification from the website server to users and search engines that a page has been moved to a different URL, either permanently or temporarily. - Is too much redirection harmful to SEO?
Basically, redirection is used to help users and search engines. As long as redirections are managed properly, they won’t harm SEO but rather provide benefits for SEO. - How bad are redirection chains?
Redirection chains can decrease website performance and make it difficult for search engines to crawl. If not addressed, the website will gradually lose traffic as search engines consider it unfriendly to users. - How to detect redirection chains?
Redirection chains can be detected using Screaming Frog, Deepcrawl, Sitebulb, or free online tools available on the internet. - Why fix redirection chains?
Fixing redirection chains can improve website quality and authority, making it more trustworthy for search engines to display to users.
