Internal redirection is a process when one URL of your site is redirected to another one internally. Users and browsers don’t notice these changes.
What Does “Internal Redirected URL” Mean?
This issue means that the URL is redirected to another internal URL on your website. These pages load slowly, which negatively affects user experience and the success of your business.
You can find out more about redirecting URLs here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/301-redirects
What Triggers These Issues?
You previously created Internal redirected URLs on the server-side of your site:
1. You used a permanent redirect because you needed to change the URLs of pages. You have applied the 301 and 308 status codes, and selected pages have permanently moved to new places
2. You used a temporary redirect because you wanted to send users to different pages temporarily. Therefore, you have applied the 302 status code
You can also watch this episode where John Mueller goes over what happens when you trigger a 301 redirect and the different factors that go into canonicalization:
How to Check the Issue?
We recommend you check these issues with online or offline crawlers that scan your site. They can recognize an internal URL on your site which returns an HTTP status code of 3XX.
Sitechecker is one such crawler. It scans your website and displays a variety of issues to fix, including redirects. Following the audit, you’ll find a dedicated section highlighting redirect-related problems.
From there, you can check internal backlinks for each URL which returns status code 3XX.
Additionally, you can examine pages that have internal links to 3xx pages.
Why is This Important?
Redirects add an extra ‘hop’, meaning content on such pages will appear slower, which is a bad signal for user interaction. It also means that search engine crawlers have to do extra ‘work’ to find the content, which negatively impacts SEO. Consequently, try to avoid internal URLs for your website.
How to Fix the Issue?
You need to take two important steps to solve this problem:
1. Define all the links of your site that currently point to the redirecting URL
2. Change the href target to instead point to the new destination URL
Checking Internal redirected URLs is a great first step to auditing your site!
Check not only the issue but make a full audit to find out and fix your technical SEO.
