Redirect Error

[3mobileIreland]

Hello,

I was sent a report from a colleague containing redirect errors:

The link to "http://www.xxxx.com/old-page/" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.xxxx.com/new-page".Search engines can only pass page rankings and other relevant data through a single redirection hop. Using unnecessary redirects can have a negative impact on page ranking.

Our site is host on Microsoft Servers (IIS).

I'm not sure what is causing these errors.

Would it be the way the redirect was implemented.

[JarnoNijzing]

Did you use a redirect on the page itself or did you use a 301/302 redirect using htaccess?

[HashtagHustler]

I would be curious to know the answer as well.

I was using a quick redirect plugin in Wordpress which I assumed was modifying the .htaccess file (not sure why I thought that). I found out it was not, and although the plugin was very convenient, hard coding the redirect into the .htaccess is much safer and much more effective.

The other thing I noticed when I looked into our .htaccess file was we had code that was rewriting the URI.

For example:

/tag/addiction-treatment/ was actually reading as /addiction-treatment/ so the actual 404 was incurring was on the /addiction-treatment/ page and the redirect needed to happen at /addiction-treatment/ not /tag/addiction-treatment/

Sorry if I jumped the gun a little bit, sometimes I get excited and I can't contain myself!

Hope that helps a ltitle.

[DeanAndrews]

You would need to check the web.config file rather than htaccess as you mentioned your hosted on Microsoft Servers (IIS). Although the following answer is referring to WWW v non WWW the principal is the same:

http://moz.com/community/q/how-do-i-redirect-non-www-pages-to-www-on-a-windows-server#reply_36077

[AlanBleiweiss]

as someone who does a lot of auditing, I need to say I'm confused by this somewhat.

"The link to "http://www.xxxx.com/old-page/" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.xxxx.com/new-page"

That's only one hop. Which is perfectly valid.  So where are the "unnecessary redirects" that report is referring to?

By all means, if you have problems on the site, fixing them is always the proper course of action.  I only wonder whether you really do have a problem.

Also, for the record, the claim "Search engines can only pass page rankings and other relevant data through a single redirection hop" is NOT true.  While more than one hop can be harmful due to slowing Googlebot's crawl, and where multiple hops can slow user experience, which are OTHER, related possible problems for SEO, as long as the hops are kept to one, two, or perhaps three at most, you are sill going to be able to get the full individual page SEO value passed.

Note that this is true only if the new destination page has all of the same SEO signals the original page had.  Because you can't magically pass SEO value from page A to page x just by using a redirect.  Even if its just one redirect. If page x is significantly different than page A, that's going to change the trust score for the passed value.

Also here's a video from Matt Cutts regarding multiple hop redirects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA