Landing Page Redirects: What to Avoid and What Not to Do?
Preventing Landing Page Redirects is a major facet of the website speed optimization guideline for Technical SEO, provided by the Google Developers Network. It is a well-known fact that Google took all possible precautions to upgrade user experience. This includes optimizing any speed issues, broken redirects that business a visitor like a commodity and URLs that produce a 404 error. This behavior stems from Google’s desire to raise user interface. Discern the sites with a certain value from the sites that indeed try to trade their traffics.
Landing Page Redirects Introduction
You can utilize a switch to divert the user from an obsolete page. It is a much better different to the dreadful 404 error messages that exponentially increase your bounce rates. However, HTTP redirects are used as the de-facto style for websites that use different URLs to serve the same content.
Using a useful strategy for Landing Page Redirects is not as easy as that. Redirects are studied a bad Technical SEO Practice. It developing the page load times and hinders the search engine’s crawl-ability.
Redirects prompt additional HTTP requests to the server, adding up the inactivity time of the page fetch. In essence, avoiding switch equates to a faster loading website and lesser load on the servers.
But Frequently the use of landing page redirects is necessary due to some valid reasons. Reasons such as:
1- To divert the mobile visitors to the mobile pages.
2- The desktop visitors who arrive at the mobile page to the HTML page.
On this hand, there are several other cases when it is absolutely necessary.
Why does it need to use Dynamic Redirects?
Visitors come on your landing page can be vital due to a multitude of reasons. Those reasons include:
- Language/ Location Specific Sites: You might have location limited sites that redirect the visitors to a various version depending on the geographical location of the user.
- Device Specific Sites: You might also have different layouts based on different devices such as a mobile, tablet and desktop. Device Specific Dynamic Redirects prove to convey the user to a device-specific version of the website.
- Domain Redirection: It is usually in account a good practice to maintain only one domain for your website and redirect all other sub-domains to the main domain.
Why and What Types of Redirects are Penalized by Google
In the former, some websites used to redirect the visitant to external pages just as a medium to trade web traffic and tone their domains. This turned out to be broadly tedious for the site visitors who soon got weary of being exchanged around like sheep. Google took initiative and initiated to penalize the unnecessary alter to and from web pages. Technical SEO analysis software includes Google Page Speed to diagnose these redirects besides other circumstances like Leverage Browsing Caching to authorize an active warning system for the visitors for such traffic.
One of the rules that define a proper redirect policy continues redirection.
For example: if a website
(A) redirects to (C)
and (B) redirects to (C)
It is allowable rather than (A) redirecting to(B) and (B) redirecting to (C).
In this scenario (B) has become an intermediate link with the sole purpose of transmitting traffic. It brings no real value to the chain besides that.
One of the solutions is to play the same comfortable from multiple URLs without any landing page redirects between the two free sites.
For instance, you can play both the sites airportlimo9.com and limo9.ca with the same content. But from the SEO point of view, these will acquire a corresponding content warning and penalize the site that was poked later. In such cases, it comes crucial to use 301 redirects to inform both the user and investment engines that it was by design not double.
Now that we have a basic helpful of using of 301 redirects, we can work against lessen the use of landing page redirects. In the next few paragraphs, we will audit some alternatives to conclude this objective.
Tips to Effectively Implement Redirects
Be Careful During URL changes: Make an effort to preserve the existing URLs and to avoid changing URLs, even all long a website redesign. This is especially true for links that are arranged by search engines and externally linked which brings you both traffic and link juice.
Avoid Chaining: Refrain from chaining redirections as much as available, considering the earlier example. Links A and B should redirect directly to C. No editor or chaining should be used.
Use Server Side Redirection (HTAccess): Use server-side redirection rather of client-side redirection. Most web servers hold internal redirects on the server end without creating the need for an extra HTTP request. Client-side redirects are usually resolved using meta tags and JavaScript code on the page.
Responsive Web Design: Ever since Google’s intensity on mobile friendliness, many SMEs have shifted to using sensible designs to create their website and layouts. This wipes out the need to create a redirection for different devices, such as tablets and smartphones with different widths.
JS Redirects
JavaScript allows redirection with the simple function (window.location.replace). After all, using JS redirects to reduce HTTP redirects is not desirable. Some of the reasons that disqualify JS are:·
Long Loading Times: only work after the whole page has been loaded in a browser.
Inefficient Method: Additional data costs are acquired when extra pages are downloaded.
Lack of Support of JS: JS is not supported on all devices and browsers. In such rare cases, the page navigation is impressed.
HTML Redirects; Canonical and Alternative
HTML supports two types of redirects; the canonical and alternative. The two types are used for two reciprocal functions, one is used to point to the desktop site, and the other is used to inform the Google crawler of the existence of an alternative page.
Annotations for desktop and mobile URLs
To help our algorithms understand separate mobile URLs, we advocate using the following annotations:
- On the desktop page, add a special link rel=”alternate” tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL. This helps Google-bot notice the location of your site’s mobile pages.
- On the mobile page, add a link rel=” canonical” tag pointing to the equivalent desktop URL.
The required rel=”canonical” tag on the mobile URL should still be added to the mobile page’s HTML.
Annotation in detail
Notice the attributes of the link tag on the desktop page:
- The rel=”alternate” attribute signals that this tag certain an alternative URL to the desktop page.
- The media attribute’s value is a CSS media query string that specifies the media features describing when Google should use the alternative URL. In this case, we’re using a media query that’s customarily used to target mobile devices.
- The href attribute specifies the location of the alternative URL, namely the page on m.example.com.
A webpage or the website itself can have more than one version of the URL pointing to it. This creates some affair for a search engine and for the SEO of the website itself.
Often referred to as the canonicalization issue. Canonicalization or c14n is the development in which the best URL is chosen for a landing page where and when there are several possibilities. One prime example is the homepage of the website, which usually has two equivalent URLs pointing to it.
Intro to the Vary HTTP
The Vary HTTP header has two important and useful implications:
- It signals to caching servers used in ISPs and elsewhere that they should consider the user agent when deciding whether to serve the page from cache or not. Without the Vary HTTP header, a cache may mistakenly serve mobile users the cache of the desktop HTML page or vice versa.
- It helps Google-bot discover your mobile-optimized content faster. A valid Vary HTTP header is one of the signals we may use to crawl URLs that serve mobile-optimized content.
The Vary HTTP header is part of the server’s response to a request, like this:
ET /page-1 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
(…rest of HTTP request headers…)
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Vary: User-Agent
Content-Length: 5710
(… rest of HTTP response headers…)
The Vary header tells the browser that the contents of the response will vary depending on the user agent that requests the page. If your server already uses the Vary HTTP header, you can add “User-Agent” to the list that’s already served
What is Vary: User-Agent?
- It is an HTTP header stating that different content is served to different users
- Commonly used for mobile SEO when pages have different versions for small screens
- Can help Google and other search engines determine the mobile version for a page
- May be used by caches to determine if and how to cache page
SEO Benefits
Why use the Vary User-Agent Header?
When your web server is affording different content to mobile users than it is to desktop users Google confirm using the Vary: User-Agent HTTP header.
- If you are using a dynamic portion to provide mobile content to users or have a free mobile URL setup, this header is large to know about and use.
- If your web pages are using sensitivity web design, this does not affect you. Because your web-server is sending the same content to all users.
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