How do you fix redirect chains and temporary redirects?
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Hi,
I have a lot of issues popping up with temporary redirects and redirect chains. I'm still confused as to what exactly redirect chains are and I don't know how to find where the "chains" are or how to fix them. I'm having two issues mainly:1. Temporary RedirectsI have around 100 pages on our www.twowayradiosfor.com website that are being flagged as temporary redirects. All of them have one thing in common: they are review pages (basically, when a customer clicks on the Review button to review a certain product, they are redirected to a review page for that product).URL Example: https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/reviewhelpful.asp?ProductCode=CLS1410-COMBO&ID=44&yes=noI went into our website and set any URL containing the following as noindex:/review.aspWill that fix the issue? If yes, will I also need to do that for any URL containing /reviewhelpful.asp?2. Redirect ChainsIt seems like basically every product page on my website has this issue (over 100 pages). Here's an example of one:https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/Motorola-CLS1110-p/cls1110.htmI don't see any broken links on this page or links that redirect to another page that redirects, etc. What is causing this? Is it something on my header bar that is redirecting (since that header bar appears on every page, maybe that is why this issue shows up on a lot of pages)?I am new to Moz and still trying to figure this stuff out. I really appreciate any help.
Thanks,
Sawyer
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Thank you again, Alex. Moz has tagged a bunch of these pages as "temporary redirects" so I have them all as "disallow" right now. I'm hoping that will fix the issue. I'm not sure why Moz is flagging them as temporary redirects. They are just review pages of my products, which I guess are generated when a customer clicks the Leave a Review button and then gets taken to these review pages.
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I might not have understood your question, so apologies in advance if that's the case.
Your redirects won't be temporary, they'll be permanent (301). As far as the search engines (and anyone else) are concerned, the location has moved permanently.
You can't really set a redirect (temporary or permanent) as nofollow. The redirect is a response code from the server, it's not a link. To be fair, you wouldn't want to set it to nofollow even if you could, you want the search engines to follow the redirection to the new place and index that.
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Hi Alex,
One more question for you. This is my understanding of the noindex, nofollow, etc. tags:
A ‘noindex’ tag tells search engines not to include the page in search results.Disallowing a page means you’re telling search engines not to crawl it.Nofollow: tells them not to follow the links on your page.So the best bet for these temporary redirects is to make them nofollow instead of just disallowing them?
Thanks,
Sawyer -
Alex, thank you for taking the time to write such a thorough and helpful response. I really appreciate it.
I will talk with my host, Volusion, about changing the noindex to nofollow.
It makes sense that I have issues with links being HTTP. I migrated my website over to Volusion from a really old platform and the website was originally created back in 2008, so I'm guessing we never fully migrated it over properly. I'm going to see if there's a way to find all of those http links and change them to https at one time, like you suggested.
Hopefully Volusion can help me properly configure the website, which should fix the Homepage and the AddThis feature and then I can use a tool to fix all of the other links.
Again, I really appreciate your help. Have a great day!
Sawyer
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Great answer Alex!
I'm not too familiar with ASP and the CMS which powers your website but if it is a case of hardcoded reference, it's definitely worth asking a developer if they can run "a bulk find and replace."
As Alex says, using relative links is preferred these days but a quick but if your developer doesn't feel up to it or doesn't want to dabble in too much regex, what I said should be a quick and dirty solution.
Good luck!
Nick
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1. Ideally, you want to set those "Review" links to nofollow, rather than the pages they link to noindex.
2. From a quick look, the problem seems to be that lots of your links are pointing to http, rather than https, which means the link gets followed and then your site redirects the client to the https version.
For example, in your breadcrumbs, you link to the homepage but at http. I would suggest using relative links to avoid this i.e "/"
Also, I assume your product descriptions were written before you moved to https, so any links in those are http too. (https://www.twowayradiosfor.com/Motorola-RMU2080D-p/rmu2080d.htm has a link at the bottom about a discontinued product that links to a http page). I would suggest using a find and replace tool to find any reference to http://www.twowayradiosfor.com/ and replace it with https://www.twowayradiosfor.comAlso, unlikely to be causing any issues, but the AddThis tool links are HTTP too, they don't get followed when you actually click them, but that would suggest to me that your site settings are still configured to HTTP rather than https. Perhaps Site Address (URL) is wrongly configured? (That would also explain the Home breadcrumb being wrong)
As an aside, I'd seriously consider dropping the www. given the already long url. It will make your SERPs a little better in my opinion.
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