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3 redirect mistakes that can cost you traffic

Published 4 months ago • 1 min read

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Redirects are a great tool that helps you direct search engines and users to the right pages.

But like any tool, if used incorrectly, redirects can be harmful.

Here are 3 redirect mistakes that can cost you traffic 👇👇👇
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Redirect mistake #1: Doing redirects “Just for marketing”

Here’s a great example I saw a few years ago. First as a consumer, then as an SEO (of course!).

Before a Black Friday campaign, all internal pages were redirected to a countdown page with 302 redirects (at least not 301s).

It’s a very bad idea, and clearly, there was no consideration for SEO here.

Redirect mistake #2: Automatic IP redirects
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Since Googlebot crawls your website from the USA, it can only see the English version of your website. This means it never gets access to the other language versions, so it can’t index it.

It’s better to have individual landing pages for the individual languages and set up hreflang tags so that Google can show the right language versions of the URLs in the search results.

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​Redirect mistake #3: Redirecting to an irrelevant page​
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An edge case here would be redirecting all the pages from the old website to the homepage of the new website after migration. It’s never a good idea.

Instead, find the best matching pages on the new website and redirect the old pages to them on a page-by-page or section-by-section basis.
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3 redirect mistakes that can cost you traffic

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Smart SEO Newsletter

by Kristina Azarenko. Tech SEO Pro

I'll help you trade an imposter syndrome for a technical SEO superpower. My mission is to break down and simplify complex technical SEO things so that you can understand and use them to advance your SEO career.

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