Questions regarding redirects and SEO

[stuaut]

Dear Shopify team

I am in the midst of moving hundreds of URLs from an old URL to a new one. I have a couple questions in regards to that:

Is the native redirect tool provided by Shopify a 301 redirect?  If not, what type of redirect is supplied?

It seems as if the tool only allows for one redirect at a time, is there a bulk option?

Any other considerations to be aware of?

Thank you!

[_Ash_]

Hi, @stuaut!

I moved your post into the Ecommerce Marketing section as that's the relevant place for it.

To answer your question, yes the redirect tool in Shopify is for 301s. In order for them to work you need to be redirecting from a 404. If you've got a lot of redirects to make than I suggest using one of the apps found here.

You can also read more about URL redirects on our help pages, here.

[stuaut]

Hi, thank you.

Is it only specifically for 404s -- I'm curious how do you differentiate a 404 from a regular redirect.

If it's a 301 redirect, how does Shopify determine if it's a 404 or not? 

Thanks

[_Ash_]

You're welcome, @stuaut!

The intention of our redirect function is for pages that are permanently being redirected from the old deleted page to a new one. When the old page is deleted a 404 will be automatically created, it's our redirect function that creates the 301. When you create the redirect if the old page is not deleted our system will detect that the page is still live and the redirect won't work.

[stuaut]

Hi _ash_

Thank you!  Sorry to belabor the point, but I am an SEO by trade and attempting to 301 via the Shopify platform for the first time.

Usually when one applies a 301 redirect from an old URL to a new one, the best practice is to keep the old URL/page live so that Google can recognize the page. My concern is that if the page 404s then Google may deindex that page instead of redirecting it. I guess my question now is what will the search engine see first -- the 301 redirect or the 404? 

If the former then it shouldn't be a problem, if it's the latter I have concerns about the efficacy of the 301s.

Thanks again

[Jason]

Some general notes:

Google will see the 301.

If the redirect isn't in place Google will see the 404.

If the page is still published, the redirect won't fire so Google will see the content (200)

If you're super concerned it would be pretty easy to just set up a redirect and view the headers/data returned (via terminal or whatever tools you may use).