Why do 301 redirects come up in the crawl error report?

[rachelmanning888]

Why do 301 redirects come up in the crawl error report when these are not technically a bad thing?

Is this just to make you aware that they are there?

Thanks.

[Eric_Rohrback]

Although they're not necessarily "bad" they aren't ideal. With a 301 redirect on your site you have an opportunity to update the link to the live page, which would be better as that wouldn't take extra resources to load. The other part is that you're losing link equity for each redirect (10-15%) search engines need to jump to. It would be better to use the final destination as the link on the site instead of a URL that's being 301 redirected. The more redirects you have on your page, the longer it will take the page to fully load and may cause a bad user experience (in addition to the lost "link juice").

Basically, it's better to have all URLs respond with a 200 (OK) response than be redirected for a variety of reasons - it causes a ranking impact and a user experience impact.

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hi Rachel! Sorry for the confusion here. The 301 redirects aren't reported as errors; they are actually listed just as a "site notice." As Eric said, they aren't considered as bad, but they do affect your SEO efforts so we think they are important to be aware of so that you can confirm that they are directing to the right place and that they exist on the right pages for your specific strategy. That holds true for all of the information that we report in the site notices section of your crawl diagnostics.

Hope that clears things up! Let me know if you have any other questions.