WordPress 301 Redirect Is Important – But It Can Be Damaging If Not Done the Right Way

 

Visitors and search engines get frustrated, when they experience the 404 Page not found. Visitors avoid visiting the requested page again, because they don’t desire to waste time on pages and links not found. 

However, it is necessary to update a website or content from time to time, but the pages or links must not stay unavailable for a long time. It is crucial to make a smooth transition, and you can do so by using the WordPress redirect plugin. In this way, you can avoid losing valuable visitors. 

What is the WP 301 redirect plugin?

It enables you to re-route your traffic from the Requested URL to your new destination URL. The visitors get to know that the requested link or page or post is moved permanently to a new location. 

Simultaneously, the search engines get to know that the address of the requested URL has permanently changed, and will be found on a new destination URL. The plugin helps to pass the requested URL’s authority to the new URL. 

301 WordPress redirects review and ratings are much better when compared to other available plugins. It helps websites in redirecting users to a new page or link, without ruining their attention and interest. It is a free WP plugin that helps to maintain a professional and functional site with ease, thus enhancing SEO results and user experiences. 

How 310 errors can damage your SEO efforts?

Most SEO professionals are aware of how crucial 301 redirects are, but they can also damage your optimization efforts. How can redirects hurt your SEO efforts?

You hold redirect chains

A series of redirects, going from one URL to another, compelling search engines and visitors to wait, until no more redirects are available to pass-through, can be defined as redirect chains. A redirect chain happens when more redirect occurs between the first URL and Destination URL, for example, ‘whiteseo.com/page’ to ‘www.whiteseo.com/page1’ to ‘www.whiteseo.com/pg1’. 

Google bots will find these redirect loops confusing, and can give up their attempts to locate the final page. Longer chain means issues in crawling and indexing, which is crucial for ranking. Moreover, the loading speed of your WordPress decreases. 

A great user experience is crucial for optimization. If loading speed gets affected, then it is important for you to tackle it. It is a proven fact that redirect chains decrease the speed significantly. 

Internal redirected URLs

An extra hurdle gets added with redirects drag more time, and delay the access of resource to the users. It is an awful user signal. Besides, the search bots need to perform extra work to locate the content. 

Internal redirecting URLs can be controlled by the website owners. They need to detect all the links, which are pointing towards redirecting the URL. Change the target, and point them towards the right destination URL.

Unnecessary 301 redirects

Over a period of time, your website will collect many 301 redirects, which get ignored. When the .htaccess file begins to get loaded with redirects, load time suffers. Everytime a visitor requests a URL, each one of the redirects in the .htaccess file gets checked, in order to find out if the requested URL has to be redirected elsewhere. The UTM codes are used, which helps to identify the unnecessary 301 errors in the list of .htaccess files.

You can fix all the above 301 issues and improve the SEO and performance of your website.