Is it a problem to have too many 301 redirects within your site

[theLotter]

my website is translated into 10+ languages, but our news articles are often only published in 1-2 languages.  Currently, URLs are created in the unpublished news languages that then 301 redirect the user to main news page since the content doesnt exist in that language.

Is this implementation okay or is there a preferred method we should be using so that we don't have a large number of pages on the site with redirects?

Thanks!

[TomRayner]

This shouldn't be a problem.

I'm guessing the URLs are automatically generated when you create the news story?  If so, then you're handling it the best way I could think of.  The only other thing, of course, would be not to create the URL to begin with in these countries, but I have no idea how your CMS works.

But to be honest, I think you're handling it just right.

[AndreVanKets]

It might not work so well in the long run.

Your HTACCESS file will get very big slowing down the redirect process. I cant say how long it would take, but the bigger your htaccess file, the slower the redirects.

[ske11]

I would look at how you can stop the issue occurring, it is working well for you now but in 5 years what will it be like?

If you are able to modify the CMS now it may solve a bigger problem down the line

Hope that helps

Sean

[rightmove]

That is assuming he is using apache. When using a webserver like nginx that has the rewrites in the config file the performance loss is neglible as opposed to reading from an.htaccess file at every pageload.

[irvingw]

What you are doing seems proper - and it sounds like you're only doing one hop, you just don't want to daisy chain 301's or you'll lose some page rank being passed.