HTTPS & 301s

[Direct_Ram]

Hi

• We have like most set up a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS.
• We also changed our website and set up redirects from .ASP pages to PHP pages
• We are now seeing 2 redirects in place for the whole of the website.
  http.www.domain.com > https.www.domain.com (1) >> oldwebpage.asp >> new webpage.php (2)

The question is: Is there anyway of making the redirect 1 and not 2?

thanks
Enver

[Highland]

I'm not sure I understand. What is wrong with the ASP -> PHP redirect?

[CleverPhD]

Just to make sure I understand.  Can you clarify the sequence of the changes and for how long?  Do you know if one set of URLs has links to it or was ever indexed.

Let me explain.

It sounds like you had a site that was using http and was an asp site. So you had URLs like

http://www.website.com/file.asp  (we will call this URL type A)

You then converted to https so the URLs were like

https://www.website.com/file.asp  (we will call this URL type B)

You then updated to a PHP site so now with URLs are like this

https://www.website.com/file.php (we will call this URL type C)

You can setup 301s to go from A to B  and then another set to go from B to C.  Your question is can you setup a 301 to go from A to C, the answer is yes. You should do this.  Anytime you can reduce the number of hops the better.

What you need to think about is, well, that about the A to B and the B to C redirects?   Well, I would say at a minimum, you need to eliminate the A to B 301s as you have now decided to skip the "B" and go right to C.  That works.  What about the B to C 301 redirect?   It depends.   If you had version B of the website out for a while, and it was indexed by Google and you have links that are built to B version URLs, then yes, you need to leave the B to C redirects.  You don't want to lose any of that equity.

Likewise, let's say you have a version D of the site that comes out a year later.  You have lots of links into the C version of the site.

https://www.website.com/file.html

You then need the A urls to 301 to the D URLs (and get rid of the A to C 301s), you need the B URL to 301 to the D URLs and so on. In other words, go through another process of cleaning up the 301s and reducing the hops.

Why do all this.  Two reasons.  There will still be links to the A, B, C versions of the site.  Google will still find them and crawl them and you want to get credit for those links to your site.  Also, Google keeps an internal log of URLs and will check them from time to time, even if no one is linking to them.  You want Google to find the right URL.    In either case, if Google hits a version A URL, it would then have to go to version B via a 301 and then to version C.  It can do it, but it would rather have 1 hop.

Side note.  Try not to use global 301s, where you just 301 a bunch of pages to the home page.  That does nothing for you as far as link equity.  Try and make the 301s a 1 to 1 relationship as much as possible.

Take a look at this video and this backs up what I just said.  The number of hops is discussed at about 3 min in.  The whole video is worth watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

[Guest]

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