(Entry was posted by Sarah Adams on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 11/21/2019).

Good processes for doing a redirect audit

Does anyone have any good processes for doing a redirect audit? I know 301s technically pass all equity, but there are thousands and thousands of old redirects on a very large site and I`d like to do an audit to clean some of them up if they are not necessary.Any good steps to identify what old ones may not be needed anymore and could be removed?

This question begins at 00:37:59 into the clip. Did this video clip play correctly? Watch this question on YouTube commencing at 00:37:59

Share on Twitter

Share on Facebook

YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Michael Martinez: You need to download a list of the published URLs. Do NOT crawl the site. If there are orphaned pages the crawl will miss them. Some pages are intentionally orphaned.

Next, grab a full list of all redirects. You may have to compile it from different sources. Don`t assume they were all done the same way in the same place.

Compare the destination URLs in the redirect list with the published URLs. Look for any destination that is no longer published. This helps you at least ensure there are no dead redirects.

Now the hard part begins.

You must see if there are any redirect destinations that point to redirect sources. You`ll have to compare the redirect list to itself to do that.

While it`s possible to write software to do all this for you (which is what I, as a programmer, would do) there *MAY* be tools that can do it. But if you depend on a tool you`re at the mercy of its complexity and (in)competency.