For example, although my domain for my website is matthewedgar. The domain matthewedgar. Before you delete a redirect simply because it lacks traffic, stop to consider who might use that redirect in the future. If even one or two people use that redirect in the next five years, could it lead to something valuable? If so, keep the redirect. The second question to consider is if people out on the web still linking to the redirected URL.
If people are still linking to the URL, those links still are providing some value—either by sending traffic through that redirected URL to your website or by helping your SEO. As a result, redirects with backlinks should almost always be maintained. To begin, we want to find the backlinks pointing to redirects. There are a variety of tools available to help us do this, including Moz , Ahrefs , and Majestic. All three tools work in slightly different but all give you a way to review who is linking to you.
In Moz, search for your domain and then go to top pages. Then export the list of all top pages. This export will include the response status code. For those with lots of links, it is also important to explore which websites link to that redirected URL using Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic. As you review the specific links referencing that redirected URL, check to see if the source page still contains the redirected URL as sometimes Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, or other similar tools have outdated link information.
But, when I go to the source page supposedly containing the link, the source page is no longer working. As you review the links, update the link tallies to get a complete picture of how many links each redirected URL actually has. Inevitably, the question the above steps lead you to is how much traffic or links are enough to warrant keeping the URL? One visit per month on a redirect may not be enough to make keeping the redirect worth it, especially if there is a cost associated with that redirect such as when you are paying for a secondary domain to redirect to your main domain.
However, if that one visitor who came in on the redirect converted, and that conversion led to a large sale for your company, perhaps it is worth it. The same is true of backlinks. If a redirect only has six linking root domains, that might not be worth keeping if your domain already has millions of other linking root domains. But, if your domain only has 50 linking root domains, those six domains linking to the redirect matter a great deal to your overall link profile.
A second question is how often you need to check redirects and determine if they should be kept. This only really matters if you have lots of redirects. For sites with more than 10, redirects, I would check your redirects and evaluate the need for each redirect at least once per year more often if you have even more redirects than that. If there are any links within your control that go to a redirect, update those to go the main source— removing redirects can improve the speed of the page being linked to and also cut down on how many redirects you ultimately need.
If you find that external websites are linking to redirected URLs on your website, reach out to those webmasters and ask if they change the link to go somewhere other than the redirected URL. Ultimately, you want to keep redirects for as long as the redirect is useful. In some cases, that redirect will be useful for a few days and in other cases, that redirect will be useful for years.
You can also select which protocol to use http, https, or both. You can also specify whether this is a permanent forward, a temporary forward, or a masked forward. HTTPS is now the preferred protocol for most situations. HTTPS encrypts the data you send over the internet so it cannot be intercepted by a third party.
Gandi provides a free SSL certificate with every domain purchase. If you create a forward using the HTTPS protocol, and a free certificate is available, a certificate will be automatically generated. Be sure to activate this certificate by clicking the link in the confirmation mail you receive. When creating a new forward, you may want to start with HTTP, then verify that the forward is working correctly.
This approach allows you to identify any problems before an SSL certificate is put in place. The following web forwards are ones commonly used that you may wish to consider adding for your website:. Apart from potentially hurting your ranking, getting rid of your redirects could mean bad customer experience for your users as well. Seeing error pages or outdated pages would badly hurt your reputation and could even cost you lost leads.
Another factor to consider before removing your redirects is your site traffic. It would be too risky to suddenly get rid of your old domain especially if your old links are bringing in so much traffic from users who still find them relevant. So should you ever take it down? If the source of most of your traffic comes from search engine results, then you can just shut down your redirects after a few months to a year.
Like Mueller said, this would be enough time for Google to track your move and recognize your new site. Is your traffic declining? Are you not generating enough leads or sales? Your email address will not be published. SEO As a best practice, when moving pages you should implement redirects from the previous URLs to the new ones and keep them active for at least 1 year. A Quick , Benefits and Pitfalls of a Redirect Without a properly setup redirect, your users might face a Not Found page or get directed to non-operational parts of your website.
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