What is true impact of permanent magento redirects?

[ennovators]

Hi everyone,

I got a tough technical SEO question, that is bugging almost everyone in the (ecommerce) company at the moment.

Due to a very "unhealthy" structure of Magento folders, with different countries using same folders in different store views, many of our URL's do change almost on a weekly basis and this is terrifying us.

What happens is, that there is a "-numberx"(ex. /category/product-1.html) added to hundreds of URLs so that we are more and more concerned about the impact on SEO.

I checked the redirect information with the Moz Toolbar and saw, the following information: http://prntscr.com/81v23e

So, even though we had URLs with /category/product-1.html, /category/product-2.html,... the redirect seems to go straight to the last number.

My question?

-Can this be interpreted as one redirect and therefore it is "less" painful from an SEO point of view?
-As we do not have a constant target URL, where does the link juice go if the target page constantly keeps changing (number goes still up)

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[evolvingSEO]

Hmmm ... I think the more important question here is - would it be possible to not have URLs changing like that? I'm not 100% sure I follow the reason why it's set up like that?

Alternatively, could the URL change with ?parameters instead? That way you could set a canonical to point to the main URL and the parameters could achieve the changes you need.

[ennovators]

Hi Dan,

Apologies for my late reply!

The changing URLs is nothing we actually set up. In fact we try to answer the exact questions you mentioned above:

• Would it be possible to NOT have URLs changing like that, or to put it another way,what is causing it?
• What impact is this permanent redirection having on the SEO performance? (in terms of building page authority)

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Mirko

I think the root fix, is to have a better URL setup (and not have them changing like that). This is something I think only your developer can answer, since I did not set up the site nor do I have expert hands-on experience in Magento - but I do know in theory, it should be possible. I've never heard of another eCommerce site doing it that way.

If you need further help from the Moz community, let me know and I'll see if someone else can chime in! But I'd definitely try to talk to your developer about it.