Comments on: Redirecting Web Pages: 301 Redirect Basics

By: Canonical SEO

Canonical SEO — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:05:26 +0000

There is really no limit to the sheer number of redirects a site can have. I’ve worked on sites where I built out out 450+ .htaccess files (one for each folder where files needed to be redirected) with 4000+ URLs being individually redirected.

The key is not to “stack” redirects. Each time you redirect a URL, you lose a little link juice (estimating 10-15% based on early documents for PR formula from Google’s Stanford whitepaper). So you want to avoid situations where URLA redirects to URLB which redirects to URLC. Instead, URLA should redirect to URLC and URLB should redirect to URLC.

By: mangesh

mangesh — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:33:34 +0000

Really thanks for this valuable information, just I want to know is there any limit for permanent redirect. For how many urls we are able to do permanent redirect.

By: Leigh

Leigh — Mon, 30 May 2011 20:02:17 +0000

A very informative and clearly structured article have used 301 redirects on my website and it has worked fine.
thanks
leigh

By: James Reed

James Reed — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 15:54:12 +0000

thanks for this/ i had my home page on a 302 which i have now changed to the 301.

great post.

By: Canonical SEO

Canonical SEO — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:15:51 +0000

If your site is ranking well in large part because of inbound links to your URLs, you will most definitely see a drop in rankings (and therefore traffic) during the days, weeks, sometimes a month or two that it takes for Google (and the other engines) to recrawl every inbound link, discover the 301 redirect for each inbound link, transfer credit to the new corresponding URL for each inbound link, and to recalculate rankings.

Some things about their algorithm (like PageRank) require multiple crawls of those inbound links before their values stabilize because they require recursive algoritms and the web is full of cycles like when Page A links to Page B which links to Page C which links back to page C.

By: Richard Cummings

Richard Cummings — Sun, 30 May 2010 19:45:17 +0000

Thank you for this info on redirects and clarifying the SEO ramifications. I was doing some research and your article helped!

By: facts

facts — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 19:49:31 +0000

Excellent post, and nice blog btw.

The part about rankings suffering is something I have experienced personally over the past couple of weeks.

May I take this opportunity to request a post on your experiences 301 redirecting entire domains, and how to minimize traffic loss.

I performed the 301 by the book with the GWT “change of address tool” and my rankings flatlined for 2 weeks.

I have now rolled back the 301, and within hours I am seeing rankings come back.

Any thoughts, comments are much appreciated. Moving forward, I will attempt to do it again on a URL level a batch at a time, once my rankings stabilize.

This will, however, be a massive pain in the butt as there are 4000 URLs and the site is WordPress based. Managing those 301s in .htaccess will be fun, not to mention 2 databases.