301 redirect hurt SEO?

[davidjames9001]

If a website which has more than 100 urls which have 301 redirect. Does it harm that websites's rank on google?

 

[StephenSumner]

A bit more information required..What and where are the 301's doing, where are they being pointed from and to where, are they external or internal? etc etc

 

[davidjames9001]

All urls are internal and they are pointed to related blog posts.

 

[StephenSumner]

If it were my site, I would want to try and tidy them up if possible.

 

[davidjames9001]

Sorry Can't get it. Please let me know what should i do for many deleted content?

 

[justinaldridge]

I'm assuming that you have already applied the 301 redirects for the deleted content. As long as the pages you are redirecting to are similar to what was there before then you shouldn't have a problem.

 

[Tim Marner]

Justin is right. As far as I'm aware and according to Gary Illyes (2016) 3xx doesn't hurt rank. I don't think there has been any developments since then but am sure Justin would probably be able to help you out further if you needed it !

 

[StephenSumner]

It does depend on the size of the site and the number of 301's we are talking about. Good SEO practice would mean dealing with internal 301's as much as possible. The main reason is that they are kind of bad housekeeping left unchecked, on a larger site it eats into your crawl budget too. Let's not also factor in that redirects will impact page speed loading times also.

 

[Rise & Climb Online]

If you are talking in relation to urls that have moved internally, 301's are considered best practice for getting visitors and search engines to where you want them to be. Large shopping sites quite often have thousands of redirects in place where the marketing team have updated the URL's to more targeted phrases etc. (and plenty more reasons)

As for individual pages, its not uncommon to see a ranking drop in the weeks after the 301 is implemented. Once the change settles the 'new page' could stay where it is, drop or outperform the 'old page'

Avoid chains of redirects - Screaming Frog can you help you identify and take care of these. Dont forget to keep your canacolization up to date and keep an eye on your search console for errors.

 

[StephenSumner]

It's still not best practice to handle bulk URL changes in that way, yes large sites do it that way but they are doing it the lazy way. There are of course instances where 301's make sense, but then there are also other ways to handle expired content that are often overlooked also, 410's 302's etc.

There should be a proper logic set-up as to how to handle content, whether it has temporarily moved, been deleted, expired etc. Most large CMS and eCommerce platforms handle it by default incorrectly and just use 301s as their default, if you have any control over it then try and avoid internal redirects, especially if the site is a big one.

 

[Rise & Climb Online]

Hence why I referred specifically to content being moved / 301's being best practice in this instance.

I agree it should be a planned and thought out process.

Of course, ideally, we should try to get our URL's right in the first place and not change them, but needs arise.

If the page is gone completely, 410. Temp, 302.

OP: There is no limit on 301's but, chains of redirects must be avoided as Google may choose to ignore after so many eg: /cars redirects to /redcars redirects to /newredcars redirects to /brandnewredcars

HTH

 

[WhizzPeople]

301 won't hurt ranking. it is better than 404s and 302 redirect.

 

[RyanCentralSEO]

301 redirect chains can impact link equity shared between pages.

I'd clean them up where possible or reduce the chain. 100 redirects is a lot to have in my opinion. There's no shame in leaving a custom 404 on your site with a search bar if you can't find any relevant redirects.