0:00:00 - Introduction to URL Redirects
0:00:36 - Discussing 302 Temporary Redirects
0:01:21 - Use Cases for 302 Redirects in E-commerce
0:03:02 - Marketing Campaigns and Redirects
0:05:00 - Shopify and Redirect Limitations
0:09:33 - 301 Permanent Redirects Explained
0:11:00 - Meta Refresh and JavaScript Redirects
0:15:00 - Advanced Uses of JavaScript Redirects in Marketing
0:20:30 - Maintenance and Management of Redirects
0:25:00 - Closing Remarks and Future Topics

[00:00:00] Hello, it's the time of the week again, it's time for Geek Speak. And today we are talking about redirects kind of what are they, why you should use them, and why they're super important for your website in your, all your marketing. And to do that today I'm speaking to you, Phelan Lewis from Seymour Digital Media, where we focus on search engine marketing and I'm Greg McKinnon with Original 72 Creative, and we're a full service website graphic design and digital marketing firm in Vancouver. Awesome. Today, this is a [00:00:30] topic you brought up, but I think we we did touch on this a little bit when we were talking about error messages, because they're interrelated.

[00:00:36] But I think we were going to touch on that. Coming up with my blog, I was like, why did I put this one right after the error? Because we just touched on a bunch of it, but yeah, whatever. Yeah, but there's also some fun stuff of we were talking about like the 302 redirects. And when we you and I both independently dug into it, I ran into it with a client.

[00:00:57] Of a use case for a 302, which is the [00:01:00] temporary redirects. And so why we would do that, because both of us are Oh, this seems stupid. Then we looked into it and there's Oh, That's a cool use case. So like for myself, it was a client that had e commerce and an in store, like they had a brick and mortar location as well, and so they would, sometimes run out of products, but they knew they're going to be getting more next month, so it's just a temporary redirect.

[00:01:21] So they just telling Google Oh we're out of this. There'll be more coming. And you know to google that makes a lot of sense because it's oh, that's not this page isn't totally going away [00:01:30] It's just going to come back You know in a couple weeks and so they'll still have a you know Just check on it and then see how it's going first.

[00:01:36] It's like this page has gone away. It's never coming back Yeah you know how? Up further the longest time companies that I've worked with have had, promotions or anything going on in their business. Sometimes we've created a separate landing page for, whatever specific that they're trying to plug at that time [00:02:00] or sell or, and it never really occurred to me because basically when you put out things, you're like directing everybody to that specific landing page for that campaign that you've got going on. But it never really occurred to me that page. Also probably has its own product page on their website, right?

[00:02:23] And so that would be one of the things that you could do is instead of having the landing page [00:02:30] and your normal product page for whatever that product or service is, you could put in that 302 redirect on that so that all traffic goes to this marketing campaign landing page. You've got set up. Instead of splitting up your traffic between, people that just happened to hit that page on your site for the normal product and the campaign specific campaign landing page that you've created and then remove [00:03:00] it when your campaign is done.

[00:03:02] And and that flows all of your traffic that was going to go to that other page your normal page to that. Landing a page for that marketing purpose. Yeah. I think that makes sense as well. And it just dawned on me as you were explaining that, I guess you could also do multiple products as well.

[00:03:22] Maybe you're doing like a big bundle sale and it's Oh no, you're going to go to The, the once a year bundle page. And so because of that, they can [00:03:30] get redirected there from the two like product pages that you are bundling, or, I'm just using an example.

[00:03:36] The other one that came to mind when we, you're you were explaining it a little bit, it was that we could have as well as like temporarily changed like the URL and the button. The whole look at the page it's not even necessarily a new page, but maybe you've done a big update and you've updated the, the URL and the page title meta description.

[00:03:52] And so it looks like it's a brand new page, but really what you've done is you updated it for I don't know, like your summer sale and it has like summer sale, whatever [00:04:00] product name is. And then so it's not, It's temporary in the sense that you don't want to it's the sales temporary, but the product page is going to go back.

[00:04:08] And then so Google still maps out your URLs correctly from where it's supposed to be. Yeah, it gets you an easy way to direct people to the page that you want specifically, but not lose any of that. Organic placement or authority with the current page that Google [00:04:30] knows because it has seen this, that you're going to go back to it.

[00:04:34] So it just doesn't, it basically just doesn't do anything with it. It ignores it because it knows that it's going to come back at some point. Yeah. And I think that it also helps with Google of knowing the flow of your website, right? You don't want that hard breaks like Googled, it's an algorithm that's trying to figure out how to lay us out all in context.

[00:04:51] And if we make it easy, it's Oh no, so we're going to temporarily be over here and like that. So they know how all these things flow together. I think Google's [00:05:00] always appreciative of that part of it as well. Yeah, we jumped into the 302 temporary redirects there and skipped over the 301 because I think.

[00:05:09] 302s, now that I know a lot more about them I find them more interesting and I'm like, look, find myself looking for how can I use this now? I really want to, I really want to use it. But the 301, go ahead. I just want to say sorry about the 301 redirects. One other thing that I found [00:05:30] that's annoying, but it's the fact that, Shopify is 20 years old and changing this now is going to be hard, but they don't enable, they don't allow you to do three, one redirects, or you're only allowed to do three, one redirects.

[00:05:39] 302 is just weren't written in to any of the software protocols. And so just one thing to keep in mind, if you do have a Shopify store and you're like, why can't I set up a 302? It's by default. It's just the way their system was. It's you have a 20 year old system and there's so many people on the platform that changing something like that might break a lot of their website.

[00:05:59] So I [00:06:00] understand back in 2004, 2006, when they were first building this, that they weren't really thinking we should have all these, make sure all this is set up. Just one thing, I just, it was a quick aside that I wanted to throw in there. Of the infrastructures there for 301s, they shouldn't have too difficult a time implementing 302s, you would think.

[00:06:21] And I'm sure eventually they're probably looking at doing that. Yeah, it, from my understanding, having I got to [00:06:30] Peek at the code base for how the how Shopify operates and it's a lot of the fact that it's like a mono Like each technically each individual store is like it's an instance of the Shopify and it has and so it's got a bunch of just weird stuff of like being a monolith code base as well that it's like it and The way that the ruby on rails was off the way they customize it off the get go It just there's some weird things with Making changes about URL structures is [00:07:00] weird.

[00:07:00] And it's my understanding from talking to some of the guys that work on the backend that things that seem simple, but because there's so many instances, things can get really weird really quickly. And so they've tried to make changes to like how the URL shaped and all that stuff. And it's just, it causes a lot more headaches than you would expect when you're, because of the way they've done the code base.

[00:07:22] And it's sometimes they're just like, it's the juice worth the squeeze and they're they're just think of it as a settled [00:07:30] issue. And they're just, we can't do that. Okay let's just move on with new apps and like extending the functionality. I get that because the platform we built at my first business was a platform, much like Shopify was where it was one code base, but you could have multiple Customers all on that same code base with separate sites.

[00:07:53] So making a change to that one application does [00:08:00] affect every site on on the platform. And I, yeah, when you, it Rang a bell in my head, thinking back, yeah, just the PTSD of some of the small things that we were like, Oh, we'll just do that. And we're like, Oh crap. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of those like a wooden puzzle pieces where you're like, you push one and it like, put you're trying to move them all around.

[00:08:26] And you just okay, now I've got this here. Okay. But now this has been [00:08:30] affected by that. And you're like, it's like this Rube Goldberg machine kind of situation that you got going on. Yeah, I don't wanna get too off topic there, but I didn't ever think of Shopify in that way. But they're really like a shared host, right?

[00:08:43] Like you, it's one platform with multiple clients all on the same platform, like sharing the same platform itself. So yeah, A as well. And then just on top of that is that they also have apps that all have to integrate with their systems. So they've got a lot [00:09:00] of people that they need to coordinate with.

[00:09:02] And so it's definitely, it's the same as like WordPress, right? People always complain that WordPress has all these old things and old systems in it. And and it's just a function of, it was 20 years ago that they started this. And now we know more about how you would set it up from scratch. But the problem is like, it's now a legacy system.

[00:09:18] And so making big sweeping changes is difficult because it can break a third of the internet. And that's a big thing that they have to contend with. And so I Yeah, I know we've gone a little far afield, but I think it does matter to [00:09:30] like, why do these things why are these things set up this way?

[00:09:33] And it points back to that, we're dealing with the end of it. Yeah. So let's get back on track here and let's get back to the 301 redirects which are permanent redirects. And for anybody who. Is not fully aware of what 301 redirects are is basically, it's a way to permanently redirect from an old page on your website to a new [00:10:00] page on your website, if you are.

[00:10:02] Rebuilding that page or, rebuilding your website or whatever it is for SEO purposes and usability cause nobody likes hitting a 404 page is to throw in a 301 redirect of what that old page URL used to be to the new page that you've built in your site. Yeah, exactly. A good place.

[00:10:28] If you're ever wondering rather than you [00:10:30] just poking around, what are the 404s that are on my website? What we use is search console's really good at telling you that we scanned your page again You used to have a page that was called, Meet the team and now it's and but they don't they just know it's broken.

[00:10:42] And so you go to the in coverage and then index and on the left hand side, and that'll tell you number four, four, soft four, four is 500, anything like that. So it's a really search console is a really good tool for that part. I know just quick plug PIP next week is going to be doing a YouTube [00:11:00] live all about search console.

[00:11:01] And so I think that there'll be some coverage in there about that. So stay tuned. So yeah we'll go over maybe 301 redirects a little bit more further in to the episode. There's two other redirects that are not commonly used or at least not commonly used for people who just have a basic websites.

[00:11:25] One is a meta refresh redirect. And what a [00:11:30] meta refresh redirect is, you can put a meta tag in the header of your website that will refresh that page that you've landed on to another page that you'd prefer them go to. I never thought of these as the same as a 301 redirects. But I guess they are similar.

[00:11:56] They do replace or another option for 301 and [00:12:00] 302 because they basically function the same way. It basically will land on that page and instantly redirect you to another URL that you want them to go to. People typically do the meta refresh directs. If they don't have access to their server or have a way to create proper 301 or 302 redirects, and maybe they have access to just throw that tag [00:12:30] into their HTML, so the page redirects but otherwise there's not a ton of use cases for it unless unless you don't have access to create 301 or 302 redirects.

[00:12:43] Yeah. The only, oh, so just going off that, I think that the biggest difference between what's the 301 and the meta rewrite is who's doing the work of the redirect. So if it's the 301, then it's a server side. So you've called to the server and said, I want to get this [00:13:00] URL. And then the server says back to them, oh, you mean this URL.

[00:13:03] So it's like the client, like the browser hasn't done any work. It's just been. it just redirects on its own. And then, so that's my understanding where it's like the meta redirect is more like your browser gets a signal and in this, in the signal that it's getting, there's a little thing that says, Hey, actually we want you to go over here.

[00:13:23] And so it's actually a double page load, right? Because the meta refresh happens on the page [00:13:30] that you don't want them to to go to anymore and directs you to the new page. So that page does start to load. And as soon as it hits that meta tag, it will then immediately just go to that other page. Back in the day when things were slower, you could actually see the page start to render and then flip To the page that you actually wanted it to go to.

[00:13:56] Yeah. That was always fun. I used to use these [00:14:00] a lot when I did flash. Oh wow. That's going back. Yeah. Yeah, this is going back to early mid 2000. Yeah, definitely. And a lot of the time there were the phase when everybody was doing these intros for 10, 15, 20 seconds, whatever.

[00:14:22] That sometimes you would need a refresh in there if you if you wanted to skip it [00:14:30] or after the. After it was over if there wasn't a call in the, or something worked into your flash that automatically sent you, you could put a meta refresh on the page that was delayed after 15 seconds or something.

[00:14:48] Or if it was just a page that wasn't flash, but you wanted this page to come up with something, but then immediately send them somewhere else, that was the way you did it, a meta [00:15:00] refresh, right? So a page would load, you'd have this message or your logo thanks for. Thanks for visiting us and like after five or 10 seconds, the page just automatically sends them to, the actual homepage or something to make it that this was, this was the way to make websites fancy back in the day.

[00:15:19] Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking man, that's just like quick aside. It reminds me of this website called most annoying JavaScript, something like that. It's a guy decided to find every weird feature that of [00:15:30] JavaScript. And it basically made makes for a very annoying. But yeah, it's just reminds me of, yeah, those old, what we used to think web development was like back in the day compared to like now or it's a lot more standardized. Yeah. And then, so moving on to the last one is JavaScript redirects. I've not ever really used JavaScript redirects. I'm. Assuming they have their, main purposes, but essentially they do the same thing but [00:16:00] it's all executed on the client side and not on the server side much the meta refresh is.

[00:16:06] Have you come across transcript redirects much? Yeah I did, but I didn't know that's what they were using until you showed, until I read the description. I was like, Oh, that was Google optimize where it did A B testing on landing pages. And so you would change like a headline or something like that.

[00:16:24] And so it would use JavaScript to just at the last second go, okay, it was really good with [00:16:30] Google ads because you could have specific campaigns or specific ad groups that they would see a different landing page or a different, slightly different landing page text, or maybe an image, a coupon code, there's stuff like that.

[00:16:42] So there was a really cool use case. The other one that was cool from the Google optimize is you could also do UTM parameter. So you could have the medium and you set the medium. So you could have email marketing and like they click on the email, they come to the landing page and they get, they see the little coupon code.

[00:16:57] Whereas no one else would, because they, it would have had the [00:17:00] UTM parameter. So there were some cool, like marketing use cases of AB testing was a big one. And yeah, like personalization or yeah, that extra bit that. The JavaScript redirects, would be things that people don't, aren't even aware are being used to do certain functions on the site.

[00:17:21] Like you mentioned and they're. I never even thought that they would be used as well for that A B testing. I never really thought about [00:17:30] how A B testing works. It's just Oh yeah, they'll serve one. Then they'll serve the other. You don't really think about behind the scenes, how they're actually accomplishing that, but it makes perfect sense.

[00:17:40] The other thing JavaScript redirects might be doing are, if you're coming from a certain location, certain country, they might have those things in there to send you to that specific country's website, for instance those type of things. Or the other one that I just, as you said that, it [00:18:00] just dawned on me, because I'm going through this torturous process of the, those consent banners.

[00:18:04] And so we have a client that is, they're pretty international, but they're headquarters here in British Columbia. But Quebec and California have a similar level of consent. compliance required as GDPR, but they don't want to have the banner show up for every single one of them. So I'm going to wager that probably the banner, and you can do it, that it's IP compliant.

[00:18:26] So provided that the person is in those areas, [00:18:30] when they access the website, the banner will show up. And if they're not in that area, the banner won't show up. So I would probably wager that it's going to be the JavaScript, pretty much does this enable yes or no. And it's based on, Oh, they're coming from Quebec.

[00:18:42] Okay. Yeah. Then we activate it. Oh, they're coming from BC. Nope. Don't activate it. And that's probably how that's working to some extent. Yeah. The use case for the JavaScript option is as I think about it pretty wide and I think of it more, um, maybe [00:19:00] more in a way of, um, not in the traditional redirect way, but it's because when I think of redirects, I think more of the 301 redirects where you're changing your URL structure and, or pages and things like that, this is the JavaScript redirects are for a complete different purpose.

[00:19:19] It's more for a usability. UX a feel where you want certain things to show up or certain places to be gone to on your website [00:19:30] based on customer information or customer location, that type of thing. So I think that's why I never really thought too much. More about it as a redirect.

[00:19:40] Yeah. Yeah, like it's definitely one that like the more I we've been talking about the More i'm like, oh, yeah, that probably is that there's just like things that show up that like compliance is going to be a big one, Not every area is going to have the same laws and just like the consent So you may have some things that like you can't show a certain image and you might want to remove a certain image because it Won't be compliant [00:20:00] with that area Maybe language as well.

[00:20:03] I could imagine that you would want to have like You We can't say these certain things in the EU that we can in the U. S. So we're gonna make sure that if they are coming from the EU that, take out these words. Like I could definitely yeah, there's a bunch of like weird edge case stuff that for, but yeah, I think it's just Take personalizing it to the user.

[00:20:23] I think that's a big use case for these ones as well. So, , I wouldn't say off of that just now that, [00:20:30] cause I think we're going to be switching over to some of the things to watch out for, right? That's where I feel we're good. Cause yeah, but not maybe watch out for, I don't know. Do I have a watch out for it?

[00:20:41] It's yeah one of the big ones that I ran into a lot with using Google optimize was performance issues. Because JavaScript takes a while to load, takes a while to run, and so the browser is going to be only able to do so much work. Don't over rely on something that uses JavaScript to do things, and your website still be per performing super well, [00:21:00] because definitely Yeah, it can cause some issues with load speeds, especially on mobile.

[00:21:05] That's when I really noticed it. Yeah, I was going to move on to like maintenance of redirects and things like, because I was thinking 301 is a permanent redirect. And I was thinking like, do you just have it forever? Cause I, cause at a certain point you're going to have so many redirects.

[00:21:28] In there, which [00:21:30] also in itself is not a great thing for Google to see that there are a ton of redirects on your set up on your site. So like the maintenance Of the redirects and how long you should, keep a 301 redirect in there. And I think that really comes down to having something set up like search console, where you can see are people still hitting this old site?

[00:21:57] Is it basically gone from the search engine [00:22:00] and, all people are going to the new page, then, maybe you could think about getting rid of that redirect because of the impact on your SEO or people not finding it is so minute by that time, I would definitely keep things for, minimum a year before, maybe checking on them to see, but.

[00:22:20] I would definitely go in and keep track of what you've got set up. I've come across instances where people have had [00:22:30] a redirect for a page to go to a new page. And then later on, they've created a redirect from that other page to go to a new page. So the, so now there's like a redirect from one old page to whatever their new page was.

[00:22:47] And then they're like, they did it again. They're like, I'm going to change it again. So now they have, so following things like that, I'm assuming that's more what Google is like, Hey, there's too many redirects here. I'm going from here to here. Yeah, [00:23:00] a lot of paid people. Yeah, exactly.

[00:23:03] And yeah, it's definitely, I was going to say that's a big thing to watch out for is chaining your 301 redirects, Google, anything more than one Google is not a happy camper about another cool feature is if you get some of the ones, the tools, like a redirect manager, Or 3 1 easy redirects for Shopify these, all these apps all have the same sounding name.

[00:23:24] It's so hard to keep track of which one's which. But they one thing they do that's good that you were talking about [00:23:30] is that they do count if they get hit, like if it, the 3 1 redirect got triggered. So that way you can get a sense of oh, people are still getting redirected here.

[00:23:38] And so it's a way that you can keep track of that as well. So just super useful for you doing that. Yeah. Be mindful of what you're setting up for redirects and just take an audit every once in a while and make sure things haven't gotten crazy. And most of the tools like we'll go over a couple of tools, at least for [00:24:00] WordPress.

[00:24:00] There's a plugin. Yeah. Commonly used called redirection. I think it's probably the most common one that people use. There's another called simple 301 redirects. And then obviously if you're using Yoast or RankMath, both of those have redirect options within them. For I guess for WordPress, if you are, using Yoast or RankMath already, don't, you might as well use the redirection features in those, [00:24:30] instead of installing a separate plugin just to do redirects.

[00:24:33] If you're not using those, you can use redirection or 301 simple 301 redirects. And the good thing about these is you can create them in your admin. You can see the stats on like how many actually, I think you can, in some of them, at least you can see. The information about how many times they're still being hit and forwarding traffic along.

[00:24:58] But you can see them [00:25:00] right in your dashboard, in your admin and maintain them easily like that. So it's it's really convenient to use one of these for sure. Yeah. They're really useful. The, and for Shopify, I just use the easy redirects is in what name of the one I use. It's never seared me wrong.

[00:25:19] Works really easily. That's the same thing. And it's free. It does have a paid tier if you want, but it's not required. I've gotten everything I needed out of it with just a symbol, just the [00:25:30] free tier. So, yeah to wrap to wrap up on three on redirects I hope people got some good information here.

[00:25:38] And if you're not using 301 redirects, definitely. Consider doing them, especially if you're doing a lot of work on your site, because it is going to any changes you're going to make to your site where you create new pages or change things, it is going to impact your SEO. So using the redirect options is really going to save you there.

[00:25:59] And I know you'll [00:26:00] probably harp on people as, the SEO guys. Yeah. And it's literally the first thing we check when we're going to like first, like the highest prior priority in any website, and this will happen with website, if you've had your website for more than a year, you are I will wage your money and you've done anything on the website with a content or plugins, anything like that.

[00:26:21] You will have a 404 on your website. Like you may not have a ton, but like almost always every website, it's just natural that people get [00:26:30] them. And it's not the end of the world. We just got to make sure that they're fixed and set it up a through one redirect. And yeah, just take a quick audit, use your search console and just Use a free plugin and just get started fixing this.

[00:26:42] Even I came across this because as a web developer, I typically put a site by my business at the bottom kind of a thing not on all sites, but on, on a lot of client sites, I'll have that. And I myself [00:27:00] changed one of my pages on my site to optimize it to be better, but then forgot Oh man, at the bottom of a lot of these sites.

[00:27:09] They're going now to a dead link. And so I didn't catch that for a little bit until I actually looked at my, my Google console or stats. I was like, why are these all these 401s that, Oh, I changed that page, right? Yeah. Yeah. It'll happen. And yeah, especially if you're not keeping track of that stuff.

[00:27:27] And yeah, you definitely, you want to keep [00:27:30] track of that. I think also as well, some of those, Plugins when you do the paid tiers, they also will do a 404 tracker So if people hit a specific 404 you could get notified ahead of it. So it's not like you can fix it even sooner but I would definitely yeah, just get started fixing broken links and make sure your website's Nice and clean.

[00:27:48] But that is it. We are over time and Just to say the thanks for watching. Let us know in the comments. If you have any questions about redirects or if there's anything that [00:28:00] you have, expand on further, we're happy to answer it in the comments. We're at cyberpunk marketing, cyberpunk geek marketing mixer.

[00:28:08] And if you want to join us next week Phelan, you're going to be on with a guest, Ashley. Your guys topic is ethical use of AI in your marketing. Yeah. Should be, it'd be nice to see Ashley. She was a regular for for a little while with us. Yeah. Yeah. I think that she's it should be a really exciting conversation.

[00:28:27] I know that the, the AI world is still growing [00:28:30] and still figuring out the contours of it. So I think that will be an exciting conversation. All right. Till next week. Thanks everyone. Bye.