Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO

[vtmoz]

I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts?

Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages.

Thanks,

Satish

[DirkC]

The crawl by Googlebot will be more efficient if it can go directly to the destination page rather than having to go trough a redirection.

There is some discussion whether 3xx redirections do have an impact on page rank / page authority - Google official point of view is that it doesn't.

Redirects do however indicate have an impact on speed (check here: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/mobile: "we strongly encourage webmasters to minimize the number, and ideally eliminate redirects entirely" - context is mobile but is applicable on all redirects) - but again for most sites this won't make a huge difference on total load time.

I doubt that simply cleaning your site and removing the 301 will give a boost to your search traffic, but it just something you need to from time to time (idem for internal 4xx errors) to improve the general health of your site.

Dirk

PS I am a bit puzzled about the remark "auto redirects" - you must make sure if you redirect that you redirect to a page which is similar to the page that has disappeared. Google considers most other type of redirects as "soft 404". If the page never existed - like domain.com/kklfjklgjkldfjg - it should return 404 and not be redirect.

[vtmoz]

Hi Dirk,

Thanks for the response with a detailed answer. Very informative. We have decent number of redirects from homepage and top tier pages too. So I decided for this activity.

Regarding "auto redirects", we have redirected tens of links these days in the process of link reclamation to increase the back-links and pagerank/da. But we have significantly dropped post such redirects even though we have cross examined to make sure the incoming links are relevant to current pages we are linking. However, those external links were pointing to our pages in past.  But as we deleted many pages in process of website redesign and content update, we replaced such pages. Why actually they consider such as soft 404 even we redirect non-existing pages to almost same pages with high relevancy? I think some of the links we reclaimed are kind of spammy and pushed us down. What's your idea on this. Thank you.

-Satish

[DirkC]

Hi Satish,

Not sure if I fully understand your answer.

Google will consider a redirect as a soft 404 if you redirect pages to non-related pages. Example: if you redirect a page about "shirts" to a page about "pants" or if you redirect this page to your homepage. If the pages are similar (example "green shirts" to "shirts") it's not considered as a soft 404. I understand that you are redirecting to similar pages - so that should be ok.

If you have pages with low quality incoming links (or a mix of high/low quality links) you can still redirect them - but in case of low quality links it's probably a good idea to disavow them (using the search console) - check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[vtmoz]

Hi Dirk,

You got it right. All the pages we redirected were pointing to similar pages once, so probably they should be okay as u said.

Regarding disavow; what are the metrics to decide on a link? Some links might be good looking with decent DA and might be hurting us. What's the best way to findout actual back-links dropping us down. Disavow comes with risk as there are chances we may reject good links, so it's better to make sure about the links.

Thanks,

Satish