We’ve always known that a 301 redirect – pointing one URL permanently to another – causes a hit in organic traffic from Google. There has been a lot of speculation around how serious and long lasting the effects are, and it certainly varies, but in a recent YouMoz post Brian Wood from Wayfair.com showed that the impact is much more substantial than previously thought.
What our data suggests is that, on average, there’s a 15% traffic loss following a 301 redirect; but any individual redirect could be much better, or much worse.
15 percent is nothing to scoff at, no matter how much traffic your site receives. The effect stacks as well; if you chain redirects, you could double, triple, etc, your organic traffic loss.
We’ve always known there was a “small” cost to implementing a 301 redirect, but our accidental SEO test showed us that the cost is quite significant, and it becomes much greater with every hop in a redirect chain.
Here’s what Google’s own Matt Cutts had to say in 2013. He didn’t specify the exact amount of PageRank lost (although it’s interesting that he does mention 10-15%), but now that we know it’s 15% and by correlation we also know that regular links lose 15%
Bottom line: get your URLs right the first time. Take the time to do the research about your URL structure before setting them up. If you must setup redirects, only do it once.
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