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ibinamaster

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Before installing db seo I used the build-in vbulletin seo-features and of course a lot of these urls were indexed from google.

Now I have installed db seo. When a user or google bot enters the old url he gets redirected to the new url.

The problem is that he gets redirected twice:

GET /showthread.php?1230-abcd/page3 301
GET /showthread.php?t=1230&page3 301
GET /forumtitle/threadid-threadtitle-page.html 200 OK

The first 301 redirects the vbulletin seo url to the standard vbulletin url and the secound 301 redirects the standard vb url to the db seo url.

Since such a bad seo behavior could result in a downrank from google is there a way to combine the two 301 redirects into one 301 redirect?
 
The reason why it redirects twice is because vB handles the redirect from its own SEO'd URL to the standard URL, upon which DBSEO takes over.

I have seen no evidence to suggest that multiple 301 redirects, while discouraged, could result in a lower ranking. I would be very interested in seeing any research articles written in the past 6 months or newer that indicates this is the case.


PS: For the future, please insert the correct URL when posting an issue. The URL is hidden to everyone except DBSEO staff, so there are no privacy concerns. Failure to do so could lead to your support query being unanswered as it would fail our piracy checks.

Thank you :)
 
Sadly there is evidence that multiple redirects effect ranking:

1. Matt Cutts from Google confirmed that with each 301 a little bit of PageRank gets lost:

I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).
Google Confirms: 301 Redirects Result in PageRank Loss!

Even if it might not be a huge loss in PageRank it still is there. And from a SEO-specific tool like db seo I would like to see a better redirecting behavior.

2. Bing stated themselves:

As a closing thought, be sure not to stack redirects. Doing so almost ensures we won't pass the value through to the end.
Managing redirects ? 301s, 302s and canonicals - Webmaster Blog

Is there a way for you to combine the two redirects into one, per example by using plugin hooks in vbulletin?
 
As I said in my previous post, the articles need to be written within the past 6 months in order for it to be relevant. An article written 4 years ago is in no way, shape or form relevant today (same for articles written 3 years ago).

4 years ago:
  • Pingbacks and Linkbacks from "link directory" sites was still a valid SEO method.
  • "Trapping" search engine bots by posting archive links in your site's footer and removing all outbound links from the archive was a valid SEO method
  • Search engines sucked at handling variable links (i.e. links like showthread.php?t=1).
  • It was vitally important to place the Meta Keywords and Meta Description tags within the first X bytes of your content

Compare this list to today:
  • Social Sharing is more important, as it's generally considered to be more "bot-proof" (i.e. my personal Facebook account is not filled with links to the same website, so if I share a link and a search engine bot sees this, my link is considered more "valuable" than a link directory's link back to your content).
  • Sitemaps and anti-trapping technology ensures that it's possible to get an entire site of relevant content indexed without needing to resort to underhand techniques, which are now heavily penalised.
  • "Friendly URLs" are more for the benefit of the user (i.e. making URLs more readable, allowing users to see at a glance what content they are about to load) than for the benefit of search engines. Search engines can follow all dynamic links with no issues.
  • Total page load speed is now a factor used in page ranking. If your page loads in 4 seconds and a competitor's site with identical content loads in 1 second, your competitor would be ranked higher due to the fact that search engines recognise that users are far too impatient to wait for 4 seconds for a page to load, unless your page is the only resource for this content on the known web.

Specifically related to DBSEO on the 4th point: Making sure all links go through as few 301 redirects as possible would be a significant performance drain, as all "go to post" URLs would need to be resolved by DBSEO before they were rewritten. There's a reason why vBulletin doesn't do this by default; it would quite literally bring large forums' servers to their knees as the "post" tables on large forums often contain several million rows, if not several dozen million.
Thus far, I have not seen a single modern, relevant resource tell me that 301 redirects are penalised, even a little bit.

I hope you can understand my reluctance to reduce our mod's usability when there's no measurable benefit for doing so :)
 
Thank you very much for informative answer!

The lasted information I found is a video from Matt Cutts were he reconfirmed his previous statement from 2010 (which I mentioned above):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw

Like with links a 301 redirect leads to a slight loss of Pagerank:

Example:
1x 301 Redirect: PR x 0,85 (The redirected site gets 85% the PR value
2x 301 Redirect: PR x 0,85 x 0,85 (The redirected site gets 72,25% of the PR value

Yes, this video is also about a year old. But Matt Cutts is a reliable source, who works for Google. And I also haven't seen any article which disagrees with his statement.

As you mentioned page load speed: fewer 301 redirects would be faster, or I'm I wrong?
 
Fewer 301 redirects would mean rendering each page containing the links would be significantly slower (depending on the link, it could be as much as 1-5 seconds slower per link), whereas the act of actually clicking on a link would be marginally faster.

It's also worth taking into consideration that the redirects don't happen every single time when accessing the content in question. Let's say you had an old link in an old post somewhere. First time a bot crawls that post, notices old link, goes through double 301 and finds the new content. The bot won't crawl the same content again because a correlation between old link -> new canonical URL now exists.

What you might be able to do is use the Custom Rewrite Rules feature to rewrite the old links, like so:
Code:
'^showthread\.php\?(\d+)-(.*)/page(\d+)' => 'showthread.php?t=$1&page=$2'
(This is 100% untested!)

That way, the old rules are rewritten to vB's standard rules which would then only single 301 to DBSEO's rules. You could attempt a direct rewrite to DBSEO's rules in a similar way, but due to the differences in how titles are generated that may lead to an extra redirect anyway.
 
Ok, thanks for your explanation. I relay appreciate your opinion!
I think I'm going to try db seo now on my live forum and hope that the 301s will not result in any problem. It will be interesting to seo how google & co will handle it.
 
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