Crawl errors: 301 (permanent redirect)

[Glassworks]

Hi, here are some questions about SEO Crawl Diagnostics.

We've recently found out this 301 (permanent redirect) errors in our website and we concluded that the two factors below are the causes.

1. Some of our URLs that has no / at the end is automatically redirected to the same URL but with / at the end.

2. For SEO reasons we have designed our website in a way that when we type in a URL it will automatically redirect to a more SEO friendly URL. For example, if one of the URLs is www.example.com/b1002/, it will automatically redirect to www.example.com/banana juice/.

The question is, are these so significant for our SEO and needs to be modified?

One of the errors in our blog was having too many on-page links. Is this also a significant error and if so, how many on-page links are recommended from the SEO perspective?

Thanks in advance.

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Lauren,

What I would say is that it looks like you're doing everything right with your redirects - redirecting dynamic URLs through to keyword relevant URLs will work much better for SEO.

Regarding the on-page links... if you have a lot of on-page links, it means that each of the links passes a smaller proportion of PageRank around the website. This is particularly important for your internal links. For example, if you have 10 links on a webpage, each of the page you link to will be passed 1/10th of the PageRank value. This can be really important on your homepage to try and pass as much of the PageRank to your key pages of your website. If you instead had 100 links on the page, you would only be passing 1/100th of the PageRank to each page.

Having minimal links on a page is important, as long as it doesn't interfere with user experience. I would say a health number is between 20-40.

Hope this helps.

[Gijsbert]

Hi Lauren,

1. This is how it should be. You probably use Wordpress? Shoudn't be a problem. Maybe better to link directly to the correct url from now on.

2. This is not a problem. Add a canonical tag (rel="nofollow") to the correct page (www.example.com/banana-juice/)

About too many on-page links, check this blog from Matt Cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

[Chris.Menke]

Lauren, you should note that the 301 redirects are "Notices" in in the Crawl Diagnosis Summary and not actually warnings.  As noted in the report, Notices are interesting facts about your pages Moz found while crawling your site.

As Bereijk stated, your redirects from URLs without trailing slashes to ones that have them is fine.  As a point of information however, such redirects are not necessary, as either version (but not both at the same time) is acceptable but you do want to be consistent in how you deal with them on your site.

Your redirects from ugly URLs to "seo friendly" URLs are also fine.

The "Warning" regarding Too Many On-Page Links trips at 100.  You might call this a soft threshold, as there is no hard rule held up by Google as what is actually too many but it's been suggested that the lower a page's authority, a fewer number of links are recommended.  Dr. Pete wrote a post on this here: http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many