How To Fix Redirect Chain in SEO

Most SEO professionals in the world have heard of the term “redirect chain” or “redirect loop.” However, a high percentage of them don’t have the right idea about what it exactly means. That’s why we’re here today to try and explain everything.

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What’s A Redirect Chain?

A redirect chain is a term used to describe a linking situation whereby a page redirects to another page. And then redirects to another one, and subsequent ones until a chain is formed. You see, it actually makes perfect sense why it was named the way it is. In some cases, one of the pages gets you back to the original page. Thus, putting the user in a real-life loop, which is an occurrence that can hurt all of your hard work in SEO. Therefore, it needs fixing and fast.

How’s A Redirect Chain Created?

There are many ways to create redirect chains. The most common of these ways are almost impossible to prevent. Since there are so many things that can cause this, let’s go over the most time-consuming ones.

• Developers and marketers without too much experience, can cause it accidentally.
• Website redesign without the help of an experienced SEO manager
• The site’s structure was made without considering SEO.
• Too many developers and marketers working on a website at the same time

Redirect Loops vs. Redirect Chains

A redirect chain is a different thing from a redirect loop, even though they are pretty similar. Loops happen when a page redirects to another page, and that page redirects to another, and it all goes back to the original page. Loops can be considered a type of redirect chains, but they shouldn’t be labeled as the same thing.

Why Is It So Bad?

If everyone did SEO the right way, the redirect chain wouldn’t exist. However, that’s not possible. For that reason, even with the sites with the best possible maintenance. The only thing you can do to prevent this from happening is to keep redirects at the bare minimum. There are a couple of reasons the redirect chain is terrible for SEO.

• All this redirecting can confuse search engines.
• Crawl time is wasted.
• Not all of the SEO value is redirected to another page.
• Pages will load much slower than usual.
• Too many redirecting will cause a search engine not to follow them, even when they become permanent.

With that out of the way, let’s see how the redirect chain can be fixed.

How Can You Fix It?

Fixing a redirect chain is a pretty hard and complicated thing to do. However, if you have the appropriate SEO tools, you will resolve all of the issues. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Moz Crawl, CMS plugins, etc. The important thing is to use these tools to match and merge every row of the data. After you’ve resolved the issue, you will be able to insert all of the redirecting URLs once again.

That’s A Wrap

Now that you are aware of what redirect chain is, and why they are so bad for your SEO, you should try your best to avoid it. As we’ve mentioned, the prevention is pretty hard due to the causes being unpredictable. The only thing you can do to prevent them is to keep them at a minimum, as we’ve already explained.

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Tags: Redirect Chains, Redirect Loop