The 14 Most Common Redirect Mistakes in SEO

Redirects done without attention to SEO requirements can lead to ranking losses and wasted crawl budget. In this article, I have put together the problems I run into most often with redirect setups.

Over time, redirects become a fact of life on the internet, whether it's because of new pages being created, migration projects, subdomain/subfolder changes, or CMS updates. Redirects may apply to just a few URLs, or to thousands of them. On WordPress, Shopify, and other CMSs, there may also be plugins for this.

You can see the most common problems with subheadings below:

Do Not Always Choose 301 Redirect

The best-known redirect is of course the 301 redirect, but your pages may need a 302, 307, 308, JavaScript, or another type of redirect instead. Here, you should think carefully about which redirect code your URLs actually need and set up your redirects accordingly. If you are going to use a 301, you may also prefer a server-side redirect.

You can use a 301 redirect when you believe your URLs really should be redirected permanently. A 302 redirect, on the other hand, signals that the page is being redirected temporarily. In other words, you can use this code when you're saying, "This page is redirecting for now, but the redirect will end soon."

Redirecting All Pages to Home Page

Don't redirect all your URLs, or the majority of the pages in your old URL list, to the homepage. John Mueller already pointed this out in past years, saying in a statement: "Redirecting everything only to the homepage is really bad practice, because we lose all the signals associated with the old content."

If you do this to pages that rank well, you may lose traffic, and you prevent search engines from fully understanding the old data.

Redirect Chain!

When a page goes through more than one redirect, both users and Googlebot are subjected to extra redirects. The correct approach in SEO is to redirect each URL with a maximum of one redirect.

For example, a situation like /zeo-old-redirect > /zeo-old2-redirect > /zeo-new-redirect creates a redirect chain.

You can detect these errors on your site with many crawlers. For example, with Screaming Frog, if these issues exist on your site, you can see them, find these URLs in the source code, and replace them with the final URLs:

If a URL is redirected through more than 5 redirects, Google may stop following it.

Case Sensitivity

For Google, uppercase and lowercase letters in a URL are seen as separate pages. For this reason, create your URLs in lowercase wherever possible, and, keeping in mind the cases where uppercase versions might occur, automatically redirect them to the identical pages. You can optimize this quickly with the .htaccess file. Example usage:

Redirect 301 /ekibimiz https://zeo.org/yeni-ekibimiz [NC]

With just a single line of code, users will be redirected to the right page even if they type the URL in uppercase letters.

Accuracy of Routing

When setting up your redirects, always check whether the old URL is actually being redirected to a truly relevant new URL. For example, your landing page for /kamp-sandalyesi (camping chair) should not be redirected to a page that is only partially relevant, like /kamp-cadirlari (camping tents). Doing so sends Google an irrelevant signal.

Search Console Reports

You should definitely review the redirect-related reports that crawlers can't identify but that matter to Google. Here, you can spot many important issues that may have slipped past you:

Referred URLs in Sitemaps

You can make sure that your sitemaps contain only URLs that don't redirect. This helps Google discover new URLs faster and add them to its index more easily.

I recommend that the News-Sitemap should be free of these problems, especially for sites with news content.

Ignoring Browsing Statistics

It is important to examine URLs with 3xx redirect code in server logs with Google Search Console to optimize the crawl budget:

You can also drill down into the URL details to see if pages should actually be redirected:

You can also examine whether 302 routing codes should really be routed with 302:

Checking Internal Links

If there are internal links on your site that redirect, I recommend identifying them and replacing them with the new URLs. This way, you can improve the pages that receive the most internal links and allow Googlebot to crawl pages with fewer redirects:

You can pay attention to these situations, especially in internal links in the content used in the blog or category description.

Anchor Texts

You should also make sure that the anchor texts of the redirected pages make sense with the final pages. For example, you should make sure that the links you provide with the anchor text "children's coat" point to the page in the final URL that points to the children's coat. Unrelated uses will make it difficult for Google to understand which page to list in this query.

URLs in Structured Data

Whichever schema type you use, such as Article, NewsArticle, Product, or BreadcrumbList, you should check that the schema code contains the information for the final URL of any redirected URLs. If you specify the old URL as the product URL in Product or product variant schema, this can send mixed signals to Google.

Duration of Referrals

When setting up your redirects, make sure the old URLs stay active for at least 1 year. Removing old URLs within a few weeks or months, before Googlebot has seen them, can cause signals not to be passed on and can make it harder for Google to understand the new page structure.

Canonical Errors

If URL A redirects to page B, and page B's canonical points back to page A, this can cause a problem. In such cases, Googlebot may use many signals to work out which one is consistent.

Using No Redirection at All!

I don't even want to think about not using redirects at all, but I'm mentioning it because I have come across it in the past. If you don't use redirects, users who arrive at your site through old URLs will see your 404 pages and won't be able to do what they came to do. As a result, you may lose your loyal users.

As I conclude this article, I need to summarize that avoiding redirect errors is one of the important improvements that have positive effects on technical SEO and user experience.