Too many wordpress redirects impact Rankings?

[vtmoz]

Our website cms is WordPress. We have recently changed the URL pattern of our blog pages which resulted in hundreds of crawl errors in Google search console. Even though we don't have any broken links; old pages have been reported at Google. We are trying to redirect the old URLs to new which will be handled by auto redirects or manual redirects. Will so many redirects impact on website? I don't mean about internal redirects. I mean about redirects made for the cause of reclaiming non existing pages referred from external sites

[Guest]

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[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

No, it shouldn't if you made sure that all the pages that you had before and that you have know will be redirected to the new pages that currently exist. In this case Google will make sure that the URLs are on the new location and if that's because of the redirects it shouldn't really hurt you. But there are a lot of things that can go wrong when setting up redirects, definitely if there are multiple.

[Paddy_Moogan]

I'm not sure how many redirects you're doing, but generally, they're not a problem if you're trying to redirect broken pages to new ones so that users get a better experience. A few things to bear in mind though which can cause problems:

• Avoid multiple redirect "hops" e.g. going from page A to page B to page C. Wherever you can, write the redirects so that they go directly to the new page which is the final destination for the user.
• Keep the redirects "one to one" - basically avoid redirecting lots and lots of pages to a single destination if you can.
• Redirect to the most relevant page that you can in terms of the topic of the pages e.g. redirect a page about blue widgets to a blue widgets page, not a red widgets page - if that's possible.
• Do a crawl of the redirects using a tool such as Screaming Frog in list mode to check them all and make sure you turn on "follow redirects" and check the "redirect chains" report it provides.

I hope that helps!