Double 301 Redirects. Yay or Nay?

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by DavidK1, Apr 10, 2007.

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  1. #1
    Hi everyone

    I have searched here and couldn't find any mention of this. I have searched elsewhere on the web, and have found conflicting information (in this industry? No Way!!) . I have read on a old GoogleGuy post that Google ignores a double 301, I've seen a moderator at another board recently post that there is no problem doing this.

    Let me tell you why I THINK it has to be done.

    One of my sites has a "so-so" seo rewrite mod. We have found one that is "excellent" and want to install it. This site has a quite a few Top 10s on Yahoo and MSN, and ranges between 20-50 on Google for the same terms.

    This is an ecommerce site with a database of 60,000+ products, therefore 60,000+ pages are changing their name. Obviously I can't load all that into an .htacess file, so here is a solution our shopping-cart developer came up with.

    All the old urls will 301 to a php file on the root which will read the old URL, check the database to see what the new URL is, and then 301 it there. So for demonstation purposes:

    hxxp://www.website.com/old-product-url9132c.html
    301s to:
    hxxp://www.website.com/converter.php (which checks database for new url)
    301s to:
    hxxp://www.website.com/new/product.html

    We have this set up running on the test site, and it works just fine.

    Would like to hear opinions on this, and a better solution if anyone knows one.

    Thanks
     
    DavidK1, Apr 10, 2007 IP
  2. darinlh

    darinlh Well-Known Member

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    #2
    my 2 cents says that if you can get it through a crawler redirect like

    http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php

    then run with it and fill in with some categorized random links on the bottom of each sub page for onsite deep linking

    Google is pretty good at reindexing pages as long as it has a 301 to follow

    Darinlh
     
    darinlh, Apr 11, 2007 IP
  3. DavidK1

    DavidK1 Peon

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    #3

    That tool is somewhat unreliable in my opinion. It states that an seo friendly age verification is unfriendly, and then another day it said everything was unfriendly... even Google's canonical 301 :rolleyes:


    This is a follow up for future reference. Double 301s are okay. W3C states that you can do up to 5 before it will be considered a "loop". Also, certain canonical redirects will do a double 301.

    If you have your site set to be www.site.com and someone types in site.com/index.html, it will first 301 to www.site.com/index.html and then again to www.site.com.

    Just to be on the safe side, our developer figured out a way to have the first 301 done on the apache level, so Google actually only sees one 301, which is to the appropriate page.
     
    DavidK1, Apr 16, 2007 IP