Google Search Console reports a “Redirect error” status. It indicates that either a redirect you set up failed or a URL-level mistake prevented the bots from reaching the destination URL. It also suggests that there was no indexing of the impacted page.
Always give the “Redirect error” pages top importance since, if neglected, they may lead to serious SEO problems like losing collected ranking signals or squandering your crawl budget. In this article, we’ll learn how to resolve the Google Search Console redirect problem.
Google Search console redirect (Table of Contents)
What does Google Search Console’s “Page with Redirect” mean?
The status for Google Search Console is “Page with redirect.” It indicates that certain of your sites aren’t being indexed as users and crawlers that attempt to access them are sent to different index URLs. Instead, the target URL will be indexed by Google.
Redirected all the affected pages are generally typical and do not negatively impact your website’s exposure. On the other hand, you must take action if you discover a significant, canonical page listed as a “Page with redirect.”
Why is this message displayed?
It shows up when a Googlebot attempting to crawl a certain website gets diverted to another page. This condition may cause your sitemap to become less visible for keywords, particularly if the redirected URL is meant to be indexed.
How To Fix A 500-Level Error (5xx): When the page was accessed, your web server returned a 500-level error.
A 500 error indicates a web server issue that stopped the website from processing your request. In this instance, Google could not load the website due to an issue with your server.
To begin with, test whether you can load the website on your browser. If you can, the problem has likely taken care of itself, but you should be sure.
Ask your hosting company or IT department via email if there have been any recent server outages or if a setting could be preventing Googlebot and other crawlers from seeing your website.
How To Fix A Redirect Error?
It was a redirect mistake in the URL. Possible explanations include an excessively lengthy redirect chain; a redirect loop; a redirect URL that finally surpassed the maximum length allowed; or a faulty or empty URL in the redirect chain.
This essentially indicates that your redirect is broken. Now go repair it!
Redirects are a regular occurrence when your original URL has changed several times. For instance: After rerouting from http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com, https://www.yourdomain.com is reached.
Google dislikes wasting time and energy browsing these connections since it needs to crawl a lot of stuff. To fix this, make sure your redirect points to the end URL alone, skipping over all the stages in the middle.
Robots.txt is blocking the submitted URL:
Robots.txt has blacklisted this page, even if you submitted it for indexing. Try using the robots.txt tester to test your page.
Despite your request for Google to index the page, there is a line of code in your robots.txt file telling the search engine that it is not permitted to crawl this page. Locate the line in your robots.txt file and delete it if you truly want it to be indexed.
If not, examine if the questioned final URL is included in your sitemap.xml file. If it is, delete it. Occasionally, pages that shouldn’t be there will be slipped into your sitemap file by WordPress plugins.
Submitted final URL with “noindex” marker:
This page was sent to us for indexing, although it contains a “noindex” directive, either in an HTTP response or a meta tag. If you want this page to be indexed, you must delete the tag or HTTP response.
You’re sending Google mixed signals. “Don’t index me, please!” Look for the word “noindex” in the source code of your page. If you notice it, either find a means to directly edit the page’s code or navigate to your CMS and hunt for an option that eliminates it.
It is also feasible to noindex a page by using an X-Robots-Tag in an HTTP header response. However, this is more difficult to detect if you need to become more familiar with using development tools.
It looks like the submitted URL is a Soft 404:
This same page was submitted to be indexed, but the server appears to have returned a soft 404 error.
These are pages that appear to be broken to Google, but the 404 Not Found error message isn’t being shown correctly. These often surface in two ways:
1. You have a category page, but it is empty of material. It resembles an empty grocery shop shelf.
2. Pages that shouldn’t be there are being automatically created by your website’s theme.
Either turn these pages into legitimate 404 pages, reroute them to their new address, or add actual content to them.
The submitted URL returns an unauthorized request (401):
When you submitted this web page with redirect to Google for indexing, it produced a 401 (not authorized) search console error. Remove the authorization restrictions from this page, or else authenticate Googlebot to gain access to your pages.
This alert often appears when Google tries to crawl a website that is restricted to users who are signed in. You should try to locate the page with redirect on your website where Google found the connection and remove it since you don’t want it waste resources trying to crawl these URLs.
This would need to be in your sitemap in order for it to be considered “submitted,” so be sure you check there first.
Input URL (404) not found:
You sent in a URL for indexing that doesn’t exist.
This issue is probably going to appear if you remove a page from your website but neglect to remove it from your sitemap. Maintaining your sitemap file on a regular basis can help you avoid this.
Crawl issue with the provided URL:
When you submitted this page for indexing, Google ran into an unidentified crawling fault that wasn’t related to any of the other issues. Try utilizing the URL Inspection tool to troubleshoot your page.
Google was unable to download and render the contents of your website correctly because of an obstruction. Look for differences between the page with redirect that loads in your browser and what Google produces when you use the suggested Fetch as a Google tool.
The issue could arise if your page primarily relies on Javascript to load content. Even Google isn’t flawless when it comes to Javascript, and most search engines still reject it. Other potential offenders include restricted resources and a lengthy page load time.
How to Fix Google Search Console Redirect Errors?
You must identify and address each redirect problem on your website before attempting to resolve the mistakes that Google Search Console has alerted you to.
Go to your “redirects” settings after logging into your content management system. This page will display a list of all the redirects that are active right now.
Do any of these 404 pages result from the redirects? Are you being redirected repeatedly while being routed from one website to another? Do any of the URLs have typos or google search console errors? If so, you must address these before resubmitting your website to google search console and the redirect list to your website.
Moreover, you may use a Google’s crawler to examine your website on google search engine. This will provide you with a list of URLs that you can then search for misspellings or narrow down by response code (to locate those annoying 404 replies). Syed Digital offers excellent digital services; get in touch with them if you need any more assistance.
As a Digital Marketing Director, I develop, launch, and manage effective digital media strategies that drive online customer acquisition, engagement, and retention across various channels, such as Google and Meta. I leverage data and analytics to optimize targeting and messaging, and collaborate with internal and external teams to deliver results.