Over time, redirects are a natural part of the web after many situations such as the creation of new pages, migration processes, subdomain/subfolder changes, CMS innovations. Redirects can be a few URLs, or thousands of URLs can be subject to these redirection processes. There may be plugins for these in Wordpress, Shopify or different CMSs.
You can see the most common problems under subheadings below:
301 Redirects Should Not Always Be Selected
The most well-known redirect is of course the 301 redirect, but your pages may need a 302, 307, 308, Javascript or a different redirect code instead. Here, you should really think about the redirect code required for the URLs and adjust your redirects accordingly. If you are going to redirect with a 301, you can also choose a server-side redirect.
If you really think your URLs need to be redirected permanently, you can use 301 redirects. A 302 redirect indicates that the page is being redirected temporarily. In other words, if you say "this page is being redirected temporarily, but this redirection will end soon", you can apply redirects with this code.
Redirect All Pages to Home Page
Don’t redirect all of your URLs or the vast majority of pages in your old URL list to the homepage. Google’s John Mueller has already pointed this out in the past, stating that “it’s really bad practice to just redirect everything to the homepage because we lose all the signals associated with old content . ”
If you apply this action to pages that rank well, you may experience traffic loss and prevent search engines from fully perceiving old data.
Redirect Chain!
When a page is exposed to multiple redirects, both the user and Googlebot may be exposed to additional redirects. In this case, it would be correct to redirect each URL with a maximum of 1 redirect.
You can detect these errors on your site with many crawlers. For example, with Screming Frog , you can see the problems if these problems exist on your site and find these URLs in the source code and replace them with the final URLs:
If URLs are not redirected by more than 5 redirects, Google may stop following the URL in this case .
Case Sensitivity
For Google, uppercase and lowercase letters in URLs are seen overseas chinese in worldwide data as separate pages. Therefore, if possible, you can create your URLs in lowercase letters and automatically redirect them to the same pages, considering the situations that may occur with uppercase letters. You can quickly optimize here with the .htaccess file. Example usage:
With just a single line command, users will be directed to the correct page even when using capital letters.
Accuracy of Redirects
When making your redirects, you should definitely check whether the old URL is actually redirecting to a new URL that is relevant. For example, your LP about /camping-chairs should not be redirected to a partially irrelevant page like /camping-cadirlari. In this case, you will be sending irrelevant signals to Google.
Search Console Reports
You should definitely review the redirect reports, which crawlers cannot detect but are important for Google. Here you can detect many issues that you may have overlooked and are important to you:
Redirect URLs in Sitemaps
You can make sure that your sitemaps include URLs that do not contain redirects, which will help Google detect new URLs faster and add them to its index more easily.
