⚠ Paging John Mueller Google Search Central (+ Danny Sullivan and Martin Splitt but I cannot tag you folks!): Google seem to no longer prioritise redirects and rank source rather than target URLs, GSC's reporting is faulty too: 1️⃣ URLs that have been redirected serverside for years suddenly receive millions of impressions and clicks, the target pages of the redirects lost all 2️⃣ Same goes for viewport-related JS redirects that require rendering 3️⃣ GSC reports both of these types of URLs as responding with a 200, indexable, and crawlable. The HTML they show, and the rendered version of the page, are the correct version of the TARGET PAGES though. Crawl reports look just fine, no fetching errors for resources or weird status codes. Was unable to reproduce the error on our end so I have to conclude that GSC has an issue no longer displaying redirects correctly... ... AND that Google somehow prefer source URLs rather than target URLs of redirects. Which does not make any sense. Issue 1 started to happen at around June 10th. Issue 2 from 2 specific dates in May. DM me if you need details. I have a few friends who witness similar movements with clients' domains. Could you please check if there is anything on your end that might cause or explain the issue?
At the risk of stating something you already know, GSC reports the HTTP Status of the TARGET URL. Not the actual redirecting URL. So, yes, it's tricky to rely on it for any diagnose.
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"... AND that Google somehow prefer source URLs rather than target URLs of redirects." How do you conclude this? Couldn't it just be a reporting bug in GSC?
Feel free to DM examples. A redirect isn't a guarantee for canonicalization, so something specific is useful.
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Would you be open to DMing me the examples? Would love to dive into the http response on different machines.
Good post Gianna Brachetti-Truskawa!!! Google's redirect guidelines have been updated to include more detail on how different redirects impact search results. Maybe this change is connected to the issues you're experiencing. Either way I hope John Mueller and the Search Central team respond soon and clarify what's going on....
STRONGLY feel indexing and crawl systems underwent some meaningful change(s) recently https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davidcminchala_new-posit-theres-quietly-been-some-pretty-activity-7211421739979804673-bMdc?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android
I'm seeing lots of redirect errors across different clients' domains, with all redirect working fine when I check them elsewhere. Especially happening with recently implemented redirects. So I'd also love to know what is going on! 🙏
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1wTomek Rudzki Bart Goralewicz Jono Alderson Did you folks detect anything relatable recently?