Redirect Chains
What Are Redirect Chains? How Do They Impact SEO?
If you know what SEO means, you surely know that its main goal is to offer visitors with relevant and useful information. Experts in SEO in Thailand want to constantly update the technology and content of pages shown on search engine results pages or SERPs to remain relevant and stay updated with the newest trends.
The result of this is that most pages turn obsolete in one point or another and changes are no longer accepted. In cases like, a new page should be created using a more optimized technology, like offering a cleaner URL or using HTTPS protocol.
This is when redirect chains occur.
What are Redirect Chains?
Redirect chains refer to the class of HTTP status code indicating that the website has moved a URL, either temporarily or permanently. Webmasters set up these redirect chains every time they need to change a page’s location or rename it. Once visitors, bots and human alike, try requesting the redirected page, they will then be sent to another URL instead of the one requested.
Redirect chains have two common forms and these are 302 or temporary redirects and 301 or permanent redirects. These two are both effective ways of managing the amount of content on a site. These also ensure that search engines and visitors won’t find your temporarily unavailable or old content.
How Do Redirect Chains Impact SEO?
Redirect chains impact SEO through slowing the speed of your website, wasting your crawl budget and hindering the effective passage of equity between pages. If the chain is longer and there are more redirect chains present, their impact on the website of your performance will also become more noticeable.
Website Speed
Every redirect can slow down the time required for a website page to load. It can cause the user to wait much longer for them to navigate in between the pages of your website. As you know, users won’t be always willing to wait long for a page to load. Google also ranks your site depending on its speed. If you have a slow-loading website, your ranking will suffer.
Indexing and Crawling
Redirect chains can also make you waste your crawl budget. Google doesn’t assign an infinite crawl to your website. If your crawl is wasted on sending bots to long redirect chains, they might miss your more valuable pages. Google bot also doesn’t crawl through every redirect. Google stops following redirects by the 3rd or 4th link in the redirect chain and move on from there.
Page Equity
If you redirect from page to page, you are actually passing the page equity from internal links and backlinks to the new page together with other ranking values. Just one redirect alone can transfer most of the equity of the original page to the new one.
Every time a redirect is added, you will reduce the page equity passing to the live page. When you have more than four redirects in the chain, the new page equity will be considerably lesser than the original page. It can affect your ability of ranking for that page.
These days, it is not just enough to know what SEO means. When it comes to SEO in Thailand, you have to be familiar with everything involved in it, including redirect chains and their impact on your SEO strategies.