Hundreds of 301 Redirects. Remove Pages or Not?

[Malika1]

Hi Mozers,

I have a website that has literally got hundreds of 301 redirects. I had a close look at these URLs and only some of them have backlinks to it and remaining all of them are not indexing in Google and has got not backlinks at all.

Based on what I have noticed experts mentioning, loads of 301 redirects can potentially slow down the site speed.

In a case like the website I have, should I completely take off the pages from website to reduce the number of 301 redirects or should I leave 301 redirects?

There is no traffic or backlinks coming from these URLs.

Malika

[MoosaHemani]

Malika, If I would be at your place, I would have made the list of all the URLs that I need on the website and implement canonicals on it accordingly. This will help me stay away from duplicate content within the website, if there is any.

Now the URLs that are redirecting, If they do not have backlinks pointing to them and no traffic is on those URLs, I would have created a custom 404 page and redirect all of those URLs to a custom 404 page so that IF the user comes in he simply understand that the page is no more available and engaging custom 404 page have the power to retain customers and move them to other parts of the website.

This will kill too many redirections on the website and overall site’s speed would have increased.

Hope this helps!

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Malika,

From the info you've provided, removing those 301s is going to be a good idea.

Below is a relevant section from a Google Developers article. The article is specifically referring to mobile site speed but the point applied to desktop as well.

"(2) Number of redirects should be minimized
Additional HTTP redirects can add one or two extra network roundtrips (two if an extra DNS lookup is required), incurring hundreds of milliseconds of extra latency on 3G networks. For this reason, we strongly encourage webmasters to minimize the number, and ideally eliminate redirects entirely - this is especially important for the HTML document (avoid “m dot” redirects when possible)."

If you're 100% sure there are no backlinks or traffic heading to those old domains, there's no reason to keep the redirects in place, particularly if the redirected pages are old enough that it's unlikely anyone has them saved in an old email or under their browser favorites.