Stacking 301 redirects

[Ampere]

Let's say you had a website that was up for 10 years. You originally had a services page but changed things around over time.

Originally it was services.htm
Then you changed it to services.php
Then you started using Joomla and changed it to services
Then you changed it to services-in-atlanta

Each time you changed it, you put a 301 redirect in .htaccess. So now you have 4 redirects

Is it ok to stack them? Or should you go back to the first and second one and change it to redirect to the current page? I assume the latter is correct.

services.htm > services.php > services > services-in-atlanta Wrong?

services.htm > services-in-atlanta
services.php > services-in-atlanta
services > services-in-atlanta
Correct?

Second question, is there a time when there are too many redirects? Would 100-150 redirects start to slow anything down?

 

[djbaxter]

Depends how long ago you made those changes. Eventually, old URLs drop out of search indices.

See which of those, if any, are still in Google index. If not, delete the redirect. Those that still remain, keep.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Removing redirect chains is a good idea. If you have many, take care of the ones to the most popular pages at least.

 

[MeganR]

The one word of caution is:

If you have old citations out there with the old version of URL, e.g., .php that are actually driving traffic to the site--you may need to preserve them until you get those directory listings/citations cleaned up with current URL version.

I've seen that for clients before where they will have multiple versions of website URLs, .html, .php and those are still driving traffic to the site.

May not be a problem for your client, but certainly worth looking at G analytics before purging even those that are not indexed.

Beyond that, totally agree with DJ Baxter above.

 

[Rich Owings]

Google says:

Avoid chaining redirects.

While Googlebot and browsers can follow a "chain" of multiple redirects (e.g., Page 1 > Page 2 > Page 3), we advise redirecting to the final destination. If this is not possible, keep the number of redirects in the chain low, ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5. Chaining redirects adds latency for users, and not all browsers support long redirect chains.

I believe they have said they stop crawling after five, but I don't recall the reference.

 

[Ampere]

Thank you everyone!