Is there a limit to Internal Redirect?

[MoosaHemani]

I know Google says there is no limit to it but I have seen on many websites that too many 301 redirects can be a problem and might negatively affect your rankings in SERPs.

I wanted to know especially from people who worked on large ecommerce site. How do they manage internal redirect from one URL to other and how many according to you are too many. I mean if you get a website that contain 300 plus 301 redirections within the website, how will you deal with that?

Please let me know if the question is not clear.

[seomozinator]

Hello, my friend.

Well, whenever people says "don't have too many redirects", it doesn't mean not to have too many redirects in total count, for example, if you have old page

a.php redirected to b.php,
and old page c.php redirected to d.php
and so on - there is no any problem. However, what they mean is not to have consecutive redirects - eg.:

a.php redirects to b.php, which redirects to c.php, which redirects to d.php, instead of a.php redirecting to d.php straight forward.

Hope this helps.

[Matthew_Edgar]

I've not seen any instances of a limit to how many redirects you can have pointing to your website. I have some clients who have thousands of redirects in place (lots of old pages being moved to a new version of that product). Those sites haven't had any issues with rankings at all. In fact, many of the links pointing to the sites still reference the URLs that are redirected and those pages that are redirected to are ranking perfectly fine.

The biggest limit I've seen is on chaining. I've seen issues where chained redirects simply aren't followed. However, if you can keep it to a 1 step redirect, or 2, then things should be okay. It doesn't sound like that is what you are asking about though. More from Matt Cutts on this:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-discusses-301-permanent-redirects-limits-on-websites/46611/

In terms of managing those redirects, you can't usually keep this many on an htaccess file without going a little bit nuts (or risking some future dev deleting those in an effort to clean up the htaccess file - ug). If you are using WordPress, the 301 redirects plugin works quite well: https://wordpress.org/plugins/301-redirects/

Unfortunately, I've also run into sites that aren't in a CMS where you can use a plugin. In those cases, I usually put these redirects in a database table. On the 404 file, I then have the code check the would-be error URL to see if we need to redirect that URL somewhere else. If a redirect is place, it redirects instead of throwing the 404 error. If no redirect is in place, the code then throws a 404 error.

Hope that helps.

[MoosaHemani]

I think you get me wrong, you are talking probably talking about chain redirects as in from a to b and than b to c and may be d. For this Matt himself said in one of his Webmaster videos that Google might not crawl the link after 2 or may be 3 stages.

I am more concern about redirects in total because redirect increase the page load time and page load time is a factor in Google rankings which make me think again before go ahead and set 1000+ redirection (for example)!

But thanks for your reply!

[EGOL]

I am going to say what I do and how I think that it works.  I am not saying that this is correct or best practice.

When I abandon a URL I do not place the redirect in the .htaccess file in the root directory.  Instead, I place an .htaccess file in the folder where the URL was saved.  That limits the size of my .htaccess file in the root directory.  I believe that reduces the amount of work that your server must do, it does not need to examine a very large .htaccess file.

If you use many folders to categorize your content then you will have small .htaccess files that are easier to manage.  From time to time you will be able to redirect entire folders instead of individual files when you abandon a product line or a category of content.

That's what I do.

[seomozinator]

Right. Chain redirects = bad.

However, in the same video of Matt Cutts, he does say that the overall amount doesn't matter, and that's what I was talking about in first part of my previous answer.

Now, let's crunch some numbers to show you that the number of no-chain redirects doesn't matter.

1. Assume that we are in perfect world, so all given manufacturer given numbers actually right and all operations per second are actually operations per second

2. Lets say that standard hosting server is 2GHz power = 2*10^9 computations per second

3. Since all htaccess work/computations are strictly on a server side (bots/browsers just send request to server for response if page should be redirected), the only time which can slow down the request is server response time.

4. Match computations are always considered low computation power processes.

5. so, let's say you have htacces with 1 000 000 redirect rules, server keeps it in memory to do match computations when bots make requests, it means that 2GHz server has to have 2000 requests per second to just START struggling.

So, do you have 2000 requests per second to your website and 1 million redirect rules?

P.S. All number above are very rough approximations

P.P.S. If you really wanna see if your server is/ would struggle - login into web host manager, go to server status and info, look and see how much of your server power is usually being used. Usually that number is lower than 6-7% at 90% of the time.

Hope this clarify some things