Could lots of links pointed to 301 & 302 redirects be a problem?

[BobGW]

Hello,

We've got hundreds of links found in screaming frog that are pointing towards 301 & 302 redirects. Could this be hurting rankings?

We've got very few 404s.

A lot of the problem is breadcrumbs of categories pointing to 302s, but the original category pages that are 302ed are not indexed so we may be OK. We can't change the 302 redirects, it's part of the cart.

Could all these non-updated hyperlinks be the cause of continual ranking drop in Google? We've gone from the top 3 to the second page for our main terms.

Thanks!

[Kingof5]

What's the reason for using 302s over 301s?

[BobGW]

This post is deleted!

[JaneCopland]

HI,

It's possible that you are not passing authority effectively to internal pages if so many internal links are 302ing. PR / authority doesn't pass through 302s, so you have a case where authority is being passed to URLs that are not indexed (as per your statement that the 302ed pages aren't indexed), and that authority is going nowhere.

Understand that you can't update the 302s - do you have the ability to update the links that point to those URLs?

This can cause indexing problems and artificially deflated authority for deep pages in a website.

Cheers,

Jane

[BobGW]

Thanks Jane,

Yes, I'm working on updating the links that point to the 302s and 301s.

But it doesn't sound like these links to the 302s and 301s could be the reason for our rank loss if I understand you right.

Also, the 302s are going to our main categories so the link juice passed would be nice but is not critical

I'll clean them up anyways.

Thanks again,

Bob

[BobGW]

Here's what's happening as I've looked into it:

The pagerank is being passed fine - The internal category buttons link directly to the main categories in the menu.

But the breadcrumb changes around as the user goes into the subcategory and then gets linked back to a category in the main page

Could these looping categories be seen by Google as a bad user experience and be moving us down because of it? It seems like it would be a little confusing to the user is why I ask.

It would be a huge job to change it, but do you think we need to?

Thanks Jane

[JaneCopland]

I'm not sure that you'd encounter a situation where Google is intuitive enough to decide on UX and equate it to a ranking factor - although they do definitely try to render pages and understand websites from a user's point of view. Not to get all UX on you on an SEO Q&A board, but if this truly is a bad user experience, consider investing the time to fix it, but as long as Google can crawl a sensible hierarchy through internal linking (ignoring the breadcrumb issue), I don't believe this will be actively moving you down the rankings.

Cheers,

Jane