I have been given a website (www.agustipardo.es), and while analyzing it with ahrefs.com, I found that it has 26 301 redirects that I don’t understand because they seem to go from some URLs to themselves. Could you help me discover the reason for these redirects, whether they impact the SEO of my site, and if I can modify the website to function without these redirects? I am attaching a screenshot from ahrefs and an Excel file with the data of all the redirects. I’m not sure if it helps, but they seem to be all gallery URLs made with Slider Revolution.
And is there any reason to do that? In fact, I don’t know exactly what method they used to create those redirects. I don’t have contact with the person who built the website.
To have a canonical url and to make relative URLs work properly for links/resources on the page.
If these URLs map to real directories on the server, then it is likely being done by mod_dir.
Having the redirects isn’t really a problem, but if you want to try and “fix it”, then make sure whenever you link to those pages, you do so with the trailing slash included.
Primarily, it’s that I’ve read that 301 redirects are “detrimental,” and it’s preferable, if possible, to use the correct direct URL to avoid disruptions in navigation. I’m not sure if that’s really the case.
Could you explain it to me in other words to understand it better?
That’s one of those broad sweeping statements that doesn’t take any account for the times when redirects can be beneficial, or at least less “detrimental” than some other status codes you may get without them.
I’m not sure how to make it any plainer. Check all your navigation and internal links for that preferred format and correct where necessary.
If in this part you were referring to web navigation, there’s no problem because the website was delivered to me with the redirects already included, and they haven’t been changed since, so there’s no issue in that regard. I just wanted to make sure whether those 301 redirects “should or should not” be on my website and if they are indeed harmful or follow good practices for browsers and search engines.
They are fine. You want them there so any “no-slash” requests get redirected to the canonical “yes-slash” URL. In an ideal world, your own site would always link to the “yes-slash” url directly so the users don’t need the redirect, but it’s not a problem to rely on the redirect. Users won’t notice the difference and search engines won’t care.
I’m referring to the navigation menu on the site, or any internal links you have. It’s just the menu seems an obvious place to start. So that means checking the links all have the trailing slash, as in:- href="/thispage/" and not href="/thispage"
Otherwise the links will point to redirects, which may be sub-optimal, but still perfectly working due to the redirects put in place.
