Hi, everybody.
It's Matt Cuts.
We're back for another round of Webmaster questions and answers.
At this point, we have made over 375 videos to answer questions.
So we started to say, well, maybe we should act a little bit like Print Princess Bride and go back to the beginning and do a little more tutorial, sort of informative videos to sort of make sure that people understand all of the really important things that matter.
But that are also sometimes a little more basic rather than just a random question that somebody asked that we're doing a one or two minute answer.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about three or one redirects.
Today.
The question is one that I Typed in myself, and it's is there a limit to how many three or one or permanent redirects I can do on a site?
How about how many redirects I can chain together?
Okay, so let's go to the whiteboard a little bit.
There's a bunch of different ways to diagram what a site looks like.
One common one at Google is to diagram a site like this because you've got your URL structure, and then you can have a sub directory underneath that.
And so you can have individual pages on the site, all that sort of thing.
So let's talk a little bit about three or one redirects.
The most common case for a three and one redirect is you're moving from one site to another site.
And if you're doing that, you can put 301 redirects to go to the root of the new domain.
But that's kind of a waste, right?
If somebody is looking for a very specific page and they end up going to the root page of the new domain, that's really not as useful.
So what we recommend doing is doing a 301 redirect from the old page location to the new page location on the new site.
And so the question is about whether there's a limit to that.
Can you do too many three or one redirects?
What if I've got 100,000 pages on my site?
Is there some cap that says I can't do 100,301 redirects?
And the answer is no, there's no queue, there's no cap, there's no limit that says, okay, we are only going to look at 10,301 redirects from one site to another site.
So that's kind of helpful to know we'll look at as many pages as we're willing to crawl on the old domain.
And if we see a 301 redirect, then we'll put that in the queue to crawl at the new location, and we'll process that now.
Just as a reminder, three and one redirects or permanent redirects should only be used when you're truly migrating for all time and eternity.
You're not ever coming back.
If it's going to be temporary or you might undo it after a while.
That's a good opportunity to use a 302 or temporary redirect.
Okay, so you've got your 301 redirects.
It's totally fine to do it from every page.
In fact, it's better to do it from every page to the corresponding new page on the new site.
There's no limit on the number of three, one redirects that we're willing to crawl within a site.
But there is one limit that you should know about.
Suppose you start on one page and you do a three or one redirect to another page, and then you do a three or one redirect to another page, and then you can see what's coming.
You do a 301 redirect to another page and another page.
At what point does Googlebot sort of stop and get dizzy and say, you know what I'm done following redirects.
If you can do it in one hop, that's ideal, right?
Because then you don't have to worry about people getting lost.
The latency is much lower, all that sort of stuff.
But we are willing to follow multiple hops, multiple levels of redirects at the same time.
If you get too many, if you're getting up to the four or five hops, then that's starting to get a little bit dangerous in the sense that Google might decide not to follow all of those redirects.
So there's no limit per page or per site.
There's no limit per site on the number of redirects permanent 301 redirects that will follow.
However, there is a limit in the sheer number of chain of redirect hops that we are willing to follow.
So if you can keep that down to one or two, maybe three, that's much better.
Once you get five or six redirects in a row in a chain, the odds are very low, close to zero that Googlebot would actually follow all of those redirect hops to get to the new destination.
So that's just a very quick overview of how it works.
I hope that explains things relatively well.
And if you can do those three directs to do the granularity of page level to page level.
That's a great user experience.
And the page rank, and those sorts of things should flow relatively well to the new site as well.
And so everything should go pretty smoothly.
Thanks very much