How to safely reduce the number of 301 redirects / should we be adding so many?

[BaseKit]

Hi All,

We lost a lot of good rankings over the weekend with no obvious cause. Our top keyword went from p3 to p12, for example.

Site speed is pretty bad (slower than 92% of sites!) but it has always been pretty bad. I'm on to the dev team to try and crunch this (beyond image optimisation) but I know that something I can effect is the number of 301 redirects we have in place.

We have hundreds of 301s because we've been, perhaps incorrectly, adding one every time we find a new crawl error in GWT and it isn't because of a broken link on our site or on an external site where we can't track down the webmaster to fix the link. Is this bad practice, and should we just ignore 404s caused by external broken URLs?

If we wanted to reduce these numbers, should we think about removing ones that are only in place due to external broken URLs?

Any other tips for safely reducing the number of 301s?

Thanks, all!

Chris

[ShaMenz]

Hi BaseKit,

What is the reason for there being so many 404's?

Did you move your site or rebuild your site structure? Do you have a lot of pages that are removed after a short time?

The answer to these questions will help to know what is the best approach for your situation.

Sha

[AaronSchinke]

In general, 301 aren't bad unless you have a whole string of them. For instance if a 301 redirected to another 301, then another, etc... If 301's are shallow they usually do not present a problem.

[BaseKit]

Hi Sha,

A combination of things, really. We rebuilt and got rid of a load of legacy pages so there's a few for that reason. We also have a lot of time-limited pages like competitions and special offers that require specific landing pages. The majority are caused by broken links on external sites though - links that never existed, or that have been crawled and added to an autogenerated page incorrectly. The usual nonsense.

So, in brief, there isn't really one cause!

Many thanks for your reply.

Chris

[BaseKit]

Yeah, that seems to be the consensus - thanks, Aaron!

Back to the drawing board diagnosing this drop - avg rank over our top 200 keywords has gone from 80-something to 120-something. Not good at all!

Chris

[ShaMenz]

Hi again Chris,

OK, well that makes it interesting!

First, if the list of 301's in your .htaccess file numbers in the hundreds, then there is definitely cause for concern about the effect it might be having on your load times.

The .htaccess file is read from top to bottom until a rule is matched. The first one that is matched will be used and no rule after that will be checked. Obviously, if there are hundreds of rules to check, this can cause processing bottlenecks.

Now there are some things you might be able to do to alleviate the problem IF you have the right conditions.

1. If your rebuild involved the relocation of an entire directory or directories which still contain the same pages as before, you can write a 301 Redirect for all pages in a directory with a single line of code

2. If there is a database behind your site and you have some means of matching pages from the old URL to the new (for example, is there a unique product ID for each page?) then you can use database lookups to write the redirects on the fly. This will eliminate the processing bottlenecks, but can only work if you have a reliable means of matching the pages.

3. If you have only one competition or offer at a time, then you could use database lookups to match any page with say, "competition" in the URL and 301 it to the current competition page (and the same with "offer").

4. For unknown links from external sites you can use a "catch-all" 301 to catch any other page that returns a 404 and send it to a single page (you put this rule at the very end of your .htaccess so it is the last to be matched). You could send these all to home, a generally relevant landing or category page, or a specially designed 404 page. The most important thing is that the page you redirect them to is as relevant as possible, or provides options that may keep the visitor on your site (search, menus etc). I prefer not to send these "random" 404's to home as they are likely to bring an  increase in bounce rate. Since bounce is now acknowledged as a ranking factor, I prefer to keep any traffic with a higher probability of bouncing away from pages with the highest Page Authority (PA).

Hope that helps,

Sha

[BaseKit]

Really helpful. Thanks very much, Sha. Much appreciated!