Any downside to a whole bunch of 301s?

[94501]

I'm working with a site that needs a whole bunch of old pages that were deleted 301'd to new pages.

My main goal is to capture any external links that right now go off to a 404 page and cleaning up the index. In dealing with this, I may end up 301ing pages that didn't have incoming links or may not have ever even really existed in the first place. These links are a mix of http and https.

Is there any potential downside to just 301ing a list of several hundred possible old urls that currently trigger the 404 page?

Thanks! Best... Mike

[LoganRay]

Hi,

You should keep your 301s to a minimum. Every time a URL is requested, the server checks every single redirect you have to see if there's a match. The larger your redirect list gets, the more impact it'll have on site speed.

[94501]

Hi Logan,

Thanks for the insight. Would a few hundred re-directs be a site speed bummer for Shopify hosted site? I've worked on other sites that had decent speed and hundreds of re-directs. Firing off spitstorm of 404s on urls that used to be landing pages for links seems sub-optimal as well.

Best... Mike

[LoganRay]

I generally try to keep redirect lists for my clients under 100. You mentioned you had some links to 404 pages, I'd focus on those and add others as you see fit based on traffic volume to those old pages. I've never actually tested the threshold at which site speed starts to become a problem, I see some experimenting in my future!

[moon-boots]

What happens when you have thousands? Is it sensible to remove 301's from say, two years ago?

[seoman10]

As I understand it, there is two aspects to 301 redirects.

1. User experience
2. Organic search

Matt Cutts says, there is no limit the number of 301 redirects, unless they are chained together. (ie. start_page > page1 > page2 > proper_page)

I don't expect it will impact on site speed much, nothing you couldn't regain with a bit of speed optimisation.

From a user perspective if you have moved an old page that has high traffic or some good quality links on it. It is very important to ensure that traffic N is back on the right page using a 301.

From organic search perspective (especially Google) again if you are using 301 is it will eventually update its own index to include the new page indicated.

There are two things you should be aware of: -

• By using a 301 from an old page, you could resurrect a bad back link
• A small amount of link authority is lost (only very small)

[LoganRay]

301 redirects do have a significant impact on pagespeed on mobile devices since they are often connected to much less reliable networks. Varvy has a great article with more details: https://varvy.com/mobile/mobile-redirects.html

If Google has already reindexed all of your new URLs, then you don't need to worry about covering every single one of your old URLs - stick with the ones the had links pointing to them.

A good way to measure how many of your 301 redirects are being used is to append query parameters to the end of the resolving URL (ex. below) where you set the src parameter to the referring URL. This gives you some unique identifiers to apply filters to in your landing page report in Google Analytics.

/old-page  >>  /new-page?redir=301&src=/old-page

[94501]

Thank you to everyone for chipping in their thoughts on this.

Logan, good article. It gave me a new idea and wanted to see what y'all thought.

If my main goal is to not have all these 404s from unpublished pages and to re-direct the incoming link value to pages that could benefit, what would you think of putting up a noindexed page that links to my top pages that I want to give greater authority to? Then, put in a request to de-index those old urls that have the noindexed (duplicate) content. That would mean not firing off a 404, just showing the same content on hundreds of noindexed/deindexed pages.  Given your point about re-directs, chained re-directs and speed for mobile, would that do more for me than re-directing all of these old urls to new pages?

Compounding the problem a little, this particular site has a catalog that comes out twice a year where many product pages are constantly being unpublished. So, even if I re-directed the old unpublished pages to existing urls, some of those might be going away and need another re-direct to add to the chain shortly.

Any thoughts on this appreciated. Thanks! Best... Mike

[BlueCorona]

Hi Michael!

I recommend checking out this blog for more insight: http://searchengineland.com/how-many-301s-are-too-many-16960

The video on the blog linked above answers: Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site? How about how many redirects I can chain together?

Other things to watch out for with chained redirects:

• Avoid infinite loops.
• Browsers may also have redirect limits, and these limits can vary by browser, so multiple redirects may affect regular users in addition to Googlebot.
• Minimizing redirects can improve page speed

Hope this helps!