Technical Tips: How to Effectively Correct Redirect Chains

Key Takeaways

[Music] hi i'm alicia from the customer onboarding team here at moz and today we're going to go through how to uncover redirect chains using your site crawl and straighten them out in order to make navigating your website simpler for both users and search engines so what is a redirect chain redirect chains happen when there's more than one 3xx level response code between an initial url and the destination page for example you have page a being redirected to page b which is then being redirected to page c and so on some of the problems with redirect chains are it can slow down load speed as each redirect can result in an increase to the time it takes to load so getting to the destination url is delayed redirect chains can also make it less likely that the search engines will properly crawl your site as well as creating a poor user experience so it's really important to identify and eliminate these extra hops when possible we can find redirect chains using the moz pro site crawl in your campaign navigate to cycle and redirect issues select just the redirect chain issues and scroll down to review all instances of these that laws has identified on your site to see the pages associated with each redirect chain select the preview drop-down and click into view all associated pages here we can see the initial url is being redirected to the second page which in turn is being redirected to a third and final location to fix these redirect chains you'll want to identify the appropriate page within that chain that is the destination and then rewrite each 3xx code to point directly to this in other words urla will be redirected to urlc and urlb will be redirected to urlc at this point you may also want to pull a report to share with your developers return to the previous page to view all redirect chain issues and export in this report column d provides you with the issue grouping identifier to show which urls are linked together i filtered this list based on that column to quickly identify which urls are strung together i've also done a bit of formatting to my list i've highlighted the destination page within the chain that i'd like each url to be redirected to with just that single 3xx now you're all set with a neat list of the redirect chains on your site along with the target urls that you want to resolve this is really going to help you organize your site more efficiently and help you create the best user experience thanks so much for watching be sure to follow moz on social media and stay tuned for more episodes of technical [Music] tips you