Transcript
Hi guys and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
This conversation is what is a redirect chain and how do you fix it? This is an important conversation for SEO because usually as your site gets bigger and as it gets more mature over the years, what can happen is that you can change URLs and everything, and redirect chains can be unintentionally implemented and they can negatively affect your SEO.
So for today's video, we're going to be talking about that. But before we jump on in, of course, this is a Zupo SEO Talk & Tea. So we want to introduce the tea today. We have a Jasmine green tea from BLK & Bold. It's a tea that has appeared on this channel before. It is a tea that my housemate ordered and 5% of the proceeds from each sale goes to disadvantaged domestic youth.And so today I have the Jasmine green tea because it's always a really nice soothing tea. Jasmine green tea is... You've probably had it before if you've ever had a Boba drink. A lot of Boba stores have Jasmine green tea. So let's go ahead and get brewing and then get started talking about redirect chains.
So what is a redirect chain? A redirect chain, to be honest, is pretty simple. You have to know what a 301 redirect is or just... Most importantly, you just need to know what a redirect is, but usually it's a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect is a code you can implement on your site that tells Google, "Hey, this URL is now moved over here.
So a common example is if you have a URL called www.sample.com/pizza, and you want to change it to pizza pie, for some reason, then you would make a new page called pizza dash pie. You would essentially redirect the old slash pizza page to the new pizza pie page. And what that would functionally do is everyone who tries to navigate to that old pizza page, the slash pizza, would be redirected or moved to the pizza pie page.
So it's a way to tell Google, "This URL, what used to be here, please redirect people to another place." So, the most easiest metaphor I can explain that is if you're at a museum or something like that, there's an exhibit. If they say like, "Oh, this exhibit has moved to a different hall." That's essentially what a redirect is the SEO purposes.
Now, how this involves redirect chains is what a redirect chain does is when as your site gets bigger, let's say you had pizza.com. You had sampled up pizza.com/pizza. I mean, so again, you get sample.com/pizza.
You 301 it to sample.com/pizza-pie. And let's say later on you decided, "You know what, I'm going to move the pizza-pie page to a different page now." So it was sample.com/pie. And then four, five months later, you redesign it again and you want to change the URL to za, sample.com/za. That's considered what we called a redirect chain because you have the original, you are redirecting to the second one, which redirects to the third one, which redirects to the fourth one.
In all actual practicality, you don't need that many redirects. You could probably just have the original sample.com/pizza, be directly redirected to the current iteration, which would be sample.com/za. And so that way, it doesn't need to go through four URLs.
And so the reason why this becomes so large is because yes, assemble is easy but as your site gets bigger, redirects can start piling on themselves and you can start having pages that redirect four times, five times. And you have to remember when you have pages, you'll often link to them on your navigation, you'll link to them in your blog.
And if you're not careful, you can remember to update the URLs on some pages, but you forget to update the internal links. And so before you know it, you still have some pages on your blog that link to the original sample.com/pizza that now just have to take the four-step redirect to the final page. And that can be quite excessive for Google to have to deal with because they have to crawl so many times.
So the reason why redirect chains are not the greatest thing is because not only does the Google crawls have to figure out this redirect chain which it pretty much just sucks energy out of their side, because they have to go through so many redirect chains to go to the other page.
Redirect chains can also slow down your website. So the more redirects you have, that means that every time someone new goes to a page, if they have to go through that four to five loop, that web browser has to go one, two, three, four, five, or before they ever get to that page. Therefore, it can slow down the speed of the cipher when the user is using it and it just becomes functionally hard to use. And so when you're using the site, the thing that you want to avoid is you just don't want to have too many redirect chains because then your site can become really bloated and just really slow.
So how you fix them is instead of having the redirect chain go through four instances, you would just have the old URL go straight to the new URL, just cut the other three out. So sample.com/pizza should be redirected to sample.com/za. Now you might be asking, what about those other three URLs? Same thing there. If you have sample.com/pizza-pie, break that redirect chain again and have that URL directly linked to the sample.com/za. That way, every redirect is only one loop, not a huge chain.
So it's a pretty easy fix. The only thing that's difficult about redirect chains though, is that when you have a site that becomes bigger and bigger, you have 10,000 pages, a 100,000 pages, redirect chains are many that like, they'll come out of nowhere and you have to comb through your website to find them. There are a lot of great tools to help you find these kinds of things like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. I believe Sitebulb has a free trial. So, if you want to use Sitebulb, you can use a free trial. I personally use Screaming Frog, but they're both great tools. And those are the ways that you can essentially identify redirect chains and then fix them.
So again, in summary though, simplistically, you just don't want to have redirects in like a five step process. You usually want redirects to be one-to-one, so the old URL to the new URL. You don't want to redirect to another URL that redirects to another URL that redirects to another URL. That's what we call a redirect chain, you want to avoid those.
So again, hopefully that helps you guys understand what redirect chains and how they affect SEO, how to fix them. I'm going to go ahead and start pouring out my tea. If you guys enjoyed the video today, please like and subscribe. I'm going to go ahead and enjoy my tea. And I hope to see you guys again soon.
Thanks everybody.