It may happen that inside Google Search Console panel you will see some non-existent website errors or errors that simply do not make sense.
Before you decide to ignore all the warnings, don’t forget that Google is able to see things on a micro level.
The most common GSC warning in 2023 is a Redirect Error. The main purpose of Google crawl bot is to search and index the content. And the first thing that bot is expecting to see is the content. You have a webpage that is important to your business and if that page has some internal links, Google bot will follow those links in order to discover more text or more media files.
How to Fix the Google Search Redirect Warning?
A list of all URL’s can be found within Google Search Console panel. Log in to GSC, select your website property and then in the left menu select “Page” and select an option related to redirects.
There you will see a list of pages that. Go to those pages and manually inspect all the links. Also, check all internal links across an entire website that are leading to those pages. Due to some plugin issues or website/server misconfiguration, it may even happen that a forward slash may be missing at the end of URL’s. If that’s the case, update such URL’s in order to avoid redirects. https://yourwebsite.com/your-page/ <. Check for typos and also always use original URL’s. If your website main URL is with WWW prefix. Always use WWW in all the links.
Important to know and understand:
The URL redirects are a widely used method to redirect page A to page B or an entire website from one domain to an another. And there’s nothing wrong if you’re using HTACCESS, plugin or any other redirects for such purposes. The main problem are the links that are present on your pages. Imagine you’re heading to Boston and in the middle of night you see a sign that says Boston 30 miles, turn left. And then you turn left and an hour later you end up in Springfield.
So, the bottom line is. Find, inspect, update or remove all the incorrect links from your pages. After you’re done with all the changes, go back to GSC and request a validation.
The Redirect Warnings Won’t Go Away?
If you manually fixed all the links and pages are still being flagged by GSC, go to redirect checker and check page URL’s and some of the links that are present on your pages: https://www.redirect-checker.org
Status code 200 means that everything is ok with the link. Codes 301 (permanent redir.) and 302 (temporary redir.) are not ok.
The Ultimate Solution
Before I tell you what’s the best solution, I will explain what’s the root of the problem. Operating cost reduction. And this example explains it all. One of my clients hosted his website with a same hosting company for 7 years. It was a good hosting company with a decent performance & support. A 6 months ago his Google rank went down and he started getting notifications about URL redirects.
When I thoroughly reviewed his website, I didn’t found a single real redirect. All the mess was caused by a hosting server that was not properly maintained. All the redirect and ranking issues were fixed with a simple migration to a better host. Later on, I worked on 18 more websites that had a same issue and each and every time, a better host was the best solution. Be aware that many hosting companies, including the reputable ones are firing staff in order to save some $.