Permanent Redirects Can Cause Permanent Damages

301 redirects.

What just came to your mind? Do you think 301 redirects are good for your website or are they bad?
Well, we all know the permanent 301 redirects are necessary to be implemented time to time. Sometimes, a page gets broken and you have to use 301 redirects to the new content page. As useful as they are, they can do a major damage to your website too. They increase the load time of a page and you can lose a significant number of audiences in the loading process.

Some redirects are necessary while some redirects are just lying there and accumulate over a period of time. It is high time and you get rid of the unnecessary steps to land the audiences on the right content. Top 10 SEO companies advise the use of tools like Analytics to find out the bad 301 redirects and get rid of them. Let us see what kind of 301s are bad for the website.

#1. Redirect to a redirect…

Your audiences clicked on a link on your website which got redirected to another URL, which in turn redirected to another. Confused? Let us suppose that the URL  www.example.com/page1 redirects to www.example.com/page2 and it again redirects to www.example.com/page3. The actual content is on page 3. The user has to wait for so much time to land to a page. As the page load time increases, the patience of the audiences decreases and they bounce off. Such kind of 301 redirects occurs because you do not clean your website well after a fixed duration. You put a redirect to handle the situation, your colleague adds another and some other person layers it with one more.

With each redirect, you lost the authority by 10%. This affects the reputation of the page and quality standard of the website. It is necessary to clean the intermediate redirects that do nothing than increasing the page load time.

#2. Incorrect redirects

The internal linking is crucial to provide a great reading experience. What if the same redirect problem happens with the internal linking too? What if the redirects are not the page that it should be? Google advises that for the temporary URLs, you should use temporary 302 redirects and when you are satisfied with the page, you can use 301 redirects. Let us consider A/B testing. You have identified the page that performs well and you are ready to make it permanent. But you are already using the 301 redirects for both the versions. It is tough to manage the situation now. Hence, it is important to know the correct use of the 301 redirects to the relevant page.

#3. Redirects which lead to nothing

Redirects are used to solve a problem and fix the broken pages. If you do not take care of your links, the redirected URL may also rot over a period of time and return 404 message. These 301 redirects are not only hindering the user experience, they are leading to nothing valuable. Thus, can do a lot of permanent damages.

#4. Unnecessary redirects

Sometimes, redirects are necessary but sometimes, they are not. Most of the time, there is a way that you can work your magic around the old URL and not direct it to the new one. Thus, the link rot problem is solved and loading time would not increase. Top 10 SEO Firms say that for the e-commerce websites, these unnecessary redirects should be limited as far as possible. The product page should be repaired in order to not lose the revenue on your products that move fast.

So, be wise in using the 301 redirects and keep checking them to remove those not needed anymore.