📘 This article explains how to use Botify reports to locate and remove redirects on your website.
Overview
Updating internal links that point to URLs that 301 redirect is an important site health and performance project for any website. Although no direct ranking factor is associated with a high (or low) number of internal redirects, there is still tremendous value in improving your user experience and optimizing your website’s crawl budget. Search engines face the challenge of crawling the entire internet as quickly and efficiently as possible, and crawling redirected URLs is one of many factors that can negatively impact this process.
Read why it is important to remove internal redirects and why it should be one of the first corrective actions when optimizing SEO.
Identifying Redirects
You need to identify the following to remove HTTP 301 redirects from your website:
Page A: The list of URLs returning redirects.
Page C: Where each of these pages is redirected.
Page B: The location of links to page A.
The process for removing 301 redirects includes the following steps:
Creating a report of pages that return the HTTP 301 status code and the pages they are redirected to.
Exporting the list of redirected pages, the pages they redirect to, and the pages linking to them.
Create a Report of HTTP 301 Redirects
To check the number and proportion of pages with 301 redirects (Pages A in the graphic above):
Navigate to the SiteCrawler > HTTP Codes report.
Hover over the "301" section of the HTTP Status Codes Distribution chart to find how many pages return a 301 (permanent) redirect. Some of these pages may redirect to a page that redirects to yet another page (redirect chain).
Click the View More link in the Insights table to navigate to the Insights report section.
Click the "301s URLs with single hop redirect" metric to find the list of pages with a single hop 301 redirect.
A URL Explorer report shows the full list of pages with single-hop redirects:
👉 URLs displayed in gray text are not in the scope of your analysis.
If there is a relatively small number of HTTP 301 single-hop redirects, or you want to export all redirected URLs and where they are linked, jump to exporting the report.
Identify Priorities
There are two approaches to defining priorities:
Prioritize based on the type of redirected pages: focus on important pages.
Prioritize based on the volume of redirected pages: focus on correction efficiency.
Prioritize Based on the Type of Redirected Pages
Unlike HTTP errors (i.e., 4xx, 5xx), redirects are less apparent to users; however, they can potentially consume search engine crawl budget since the crawler must request two URLs to get the content (the redirecting page and the destination). Prioritization is important to ensure that correcting links to redirecting pages will have the largest impact.
Important redirected pages may include:
Key content pages on your website (e.g., articles, product pages).
Navigation pages found in breadcrumbs or menus.
Canonical pages, or pages that would meet all of Botify's criteria for SEO indexable pages if they were not redirected.
Use filters in the URL Explorer or the contextual charts to understand which segments constitute the bulk of your redirected pages.
When you have defined your priorities, make your selection with the appropriate filters. Then export the data to correct these high-priority redirected pages.
Prioritize Based on the Volume of Redirected Pages
You can prioritize by identifying HTTP 200 status pages that link to the most URLs that redirect (Page B below has 4 links to pages that redirect).
This prioritization method may make sense for implementation reasons since it saves time when you target the pages with the most links to be corrected.
To find pages with links to HTTP 3xx pages:
Navigate to the SiteCrawler > Outlinks report.
Scroll to the "Internal Follow Outlinks Broken Links Destination" chart at the bottom of the page.
Click the HTTP 3xx section to open a URL Explorer report of the pages with internal links to HTTP 3XX pages and the number of 3XX links on each page.
Add a filter to see only destination pages with a 301 HTTP status code.
Add a column for the destination of each of these internal links to see a line for each page and the destination link that 301 redirects.
Now you can export this list of pages to prioritize where to correct redirecting links, a great complement to the list of redirected pages.
💡 You may want to add additional filters to focus on pages based on a specific segment or their number of redirected links (e.g., more than three).
Refine and Export the Report
With the list of redirected pages to correct and the pages they redirect to, you only need to find where they are linked from.
Add the following filters to get only pages that receive at least one incoming link and are not part of a redirect chain: No. of Unique Inlinks > 0 and No. of Redirection Hops To Ultimate Destination = 1.
Add the following columns:
The Redirect destination: “Ultimate Redirect Destination - Full URL”
The number of links to this page: "Total No. of Inlinks "
The number of unique pages that link to this page: "No. of Unique Inlinks" (links found several times on the same page are counted only once)
Pages that link to this page: "Source - Full URL". This creates an individual record for each redirecting page and each instance of a link to that page. Your resulting export may have many more lines than just the number of redirecting pages.
Review the report:
The URL in the first column is the page that returns HTTP 301 (redirected URL);
It redirects to the URL in the 2nd column;
It is linked to [N] times from all pages (3rd column);
These links come from [N] distinct pages (4th column), each listed in the 5th column.
Click the Export as CSV link. Use the exported file to update every instance of a link to the URL in Column A to instead point to the URL in Column B.