Flawed redirects or Google Search Console error?
In the last couple of days, at the beginning of December 2021, many pages would notice redirect errors detected by Google Search Console. Did the tool get to errors not previously detected? Or is it Google Search Console’s own error?
If you were racking your brain over new errors on your site, we might have some good news for you. It’s the Google Search Console error that also affected many websites we’re working on and for the moment we thought our inbox would explode from the amount of GSC notifications.
Once we checked, Google Search Console was showing an increase in the number of redirect errors:
In that case, one should be worried, especially when the errors are connected with redirects. Flawed redirects can easily cause content duplication which eventually leads to decreasing visibility of a particular page.
Luckily, Google quickly informed about the problems with the Search Console tool which would display nonexistent errors:
An internal issue is causing an increase of redirect errors during indexing, and associated email notifications. This is not due to any website issues, but is due to an internal Google issue. We hope to fix this problem quickly.
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) December 13, 2021
Does that mean you can ignore the notifications?
Yes, but only when you are sure that your website really doesn’t have any errors. If the number of errors increased during the last couple of days, probably it was due to Google Search Console problems. However, in the following days, you must get a closer look at the matter and probably fix your errors.
How to check if redirects are correct?
If you want to make sure your redirects are working correctly (which we highly recommend, obviously ;)), use tools like HTTPS Status or the Redirect Path plugin.
Copy and paste your URL address you want to check into the tool and check the results. The correct redirect would be the 301 one, which is permanent and transfers the page’s strength.
In the tool you should see:
- 301 redirect code,
- 200 code – meaning your page was found and works correctly,
- Information about only 1 existing redirect (remember that redirect chain can lower your domain strength).
If you want to learn more on how to properly fix redirects, what types of redirects are available, and how to correctly set them – check our article: Why to use redirects and what are their types?
