The redirects which are used on the websites for the not available content do have some effects on the SEO. Though the optimization of SEO is quite tricky, the main motto of it is to offer relevant information to visitors. As an SEO optimizer, you need to keep updating the content and the technology on your page to ensure what will be displayed on the SERPs. Including the new content, the new trends need to be included in your website so that it can look more relevant and upgraded to the crawlers, which help in better indexing.
However, after some time, some of the pages can become obsolete as you cannot make any changes to them anymore. In such cases, you need to create a completely new page with better features and functions. But how would you let your users know about the new page you have created? The redirection of the URLs is the best way to do it. But how does the redirection of URLs affect SEO? Have a look:
What is a redirection of URL?
The redirection of an URL comes as an HTTP Status code which is given to the older page. It tells Google to show the new page instead of it. Adding a redirect to a page will indicate that there is a new URL for this topic that replaces the old one. It automatically redirects the visitors to the new page. This helps the website to serve more relevant content to the user and Google instead of the obsolete one.
What are the various types of redirects?
There is more than one type of redirect which is used for various purposes on the page. Here are the redirects which are usually used for the URL redirection:
- 301 redirect: The 301 redirect redirects your page to the final version you want to show to your search engine. The 301 redirect is the permanent addition to your site.
- 302 redirect: The 302 redirect, on the other hand, is not the permanent one. Many pages need temporary URLs. The 302 redirect in such cases comes to be the most useful one as it sends a signal to Google to crawl both the redirects and the original page.
These two redirects are the most relevant ones for your SEO strategy. Utah SEO can help you to get the proper implementation of the redirects to your website.
How do URLs affect SEO?
As you set up the redirects to your site, it becomes vital that you do not affect your SEO rankings. There is a common concern about redirects if it is bad for SEO or not.
However, whether it is bad or not is completely dependent on the various conditions. In most cases, the Redirects are not bad for the SEO unless you are putting it wrongly.
The bad implementation of the redirection of URLs will negatively hamper your SEO ranking. It can either affect your PageRank or the traffic on your page. On the other hand, the redirecting URLs are the must-haves if you are making any of the changes to your URLs.
The proper implementation of one 301 redirects can improve the speed of your page loading. Your users might not notice it, but Google takes account of it. It helps the spider crawler crawl the newer page, adding some millisecond to the page loading speed.
On the other hand, if you are having the redirects between pages 1 and 2 and you have created page 3 that sends a new URL redirection from the existing one, then it will make up 2 redirects from page 1 that the bot has to follow. It will leave a negative impact on your SEO.
There is no limit to the number of redirects on a website. But for one page, there is a maximum number. Google recommends its users not to put more than 2 redirects for one page. Adding too many redirects will frustrate the spider crawler, and it will stop visiting those redirects.
A page might lose its authority if there are more than one or two redirects which affects the SEO in a much negative way. This is why it is important to limit the number of redirects for an individual page which is good for SEO.
Conclusion:
The redirects on your page do not have any negative effect if you know how to place them properly. Redirects are a must to provide the relevant most results to your users. But it should be implemented in a way that can improve the performance of the page and the SEO rank.