URL Redirecting Techniques

What are redirects?

Redirects are a way to redirect site users to a different URL than what they requested. Double pages worsen the ranking of the site, and redirects help to fight them.

They are also used when you need to create a new page to replace an existing one and at the same time save positions and traffic. There are 9 types of redirects, but only three of them are actively used in SEO practice:

1. 301 Moved Permanently (permanent redirect) – indicates that the document has been moved to a new URL forever. When SEO experts or developers talk about a redirect, they almost always mean 301 redirects. The old address disappears from the issue, its place with the preservation of positions is occupied by the new one.

2. 302 Found, 302 Moved Temporarily (found, moved temporarily) – the document is moved temporarily, for example, it takes the user to a promotion (sales) page without changing the contents of the old page. At the same time, the old address of the page remains in the output, because it is temporarily moved to the new one.

3. 307 Temporary Redirect (temporary redirect) – the requested document is briefly available at a different URL with preservation of the request transfer method (GET, POST). In general, performs the same task as the 302 redirect.

According to researchers, Google may not distinguish between response codes 301 and 302 – all options transfer 100% of the reference weight and PageRank from the old address to the new. So if Google decides that you installed a 302 redirect by mistake, it will perceive it as 301.

General tips for setting up redirects

1. Redirect only to relevant pages, with a status of 200 (OK)

The more relevant the acceptor page (the one that accepts the redirect) to the donor page, the faster they will stick together and the more weight it will transfer.

2. Do not use the redirect where it is better to put rel = canonical

If the content of the pages is duplicated, but it is important for you to keep the pages accessible to users, use rel = canonical instead of redirect. For example, if there are several versions of content (for printing, for mobile,)

3. Do not use redirects for the robots.txt file

This advice is more concerned with Yandex PS – it is important for it that when changing the domain or moving to a secure protocol, the old robots. txt was available to robots – this is how glueing of domains occurs faster.

4. Avoid two, three or more redirects in a row.

Each new redirect is a loss of load time, an extra load on the server and a possible loss of the transmitted page weight.

5. In the .htaccess file, first use page redirection with a higher level of nesting , for example:

1. first redirect from site.com/category-1/subcategory-1/ to site.com/category-1/subcategory-2/;

2. then from site.com/category-0/ to site.com/category-0;

3. and lastly, global rules of redirecting all pages without “/” to pages with “/”.

On large resources with many redirects, the non-observance of this rule leads to the appearance of pages with 404 errors.

6. Browsers cache redirects –

To check their work, flush the cache or use specialized services .