Internal redirected URLs
This means that the URL in question is redirected to another internal URL.
Why is this important?
A redirected URL, typically 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) means that the location of the page has changed, and the user is sent from the original URL to a new one. Since content gets changed and moved all the time, it is relatively common for redirects to occur, however, they make the experience worse for both users and search engine crawlers.
Redirects add an extra 'hop', which means it takes longer for the content to become available, which is a bad user signal, and means that search engine crawlers have to do extra 'work' to find the content.
For internal URLs in particular, where the website owner can control the experience, redirecting URLs should be avoided if possible.
What does the Hint check?
This Hint will trigger for any internal URL which returns a HTTP status code of 3XX.
Examples that trigger this Hint:
The Hint would trigger for any URL if it returned a 301 HTTP header response;
Or indeed any other 3XX HTTP response.
How do you resolve this issue?
The issue with redirects is not that they exist in the first place, it is that you have internal links pointing to them, instead of the 'new' destination URL.
The way to handle internal redirects is identify all the links that currently point to the redirecting URL, and change the href target to instead point to the new destination URL.
How do you get more data from Sitebulb?
From the URL List, you can click on the 'URL Details' button for any individual URL. From here you can see the redirect chain, which will show you the final destination URL (with status code 200).
You can also then view the Internal Links, which will need to be updated to the destination URL:
This allows you to handle each redirect individually. But if you want to deal with them in bulk, the best way to do this is to export the data and work from there.
From the URL List, click on the green button Export Hint Data.
Then the export file will give you everything you need to resolve each one, including example URLs that link to the redirect, and clarification if the links are part of the navigation or in-content.
