WordPress 301 redirects post to itself

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • George Appiah

    (@gappiah)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Unable to check the HTTP response header now as I’m on a phone.

    But if the post redirected to itself, that would cause an infinite loop making it completely inaccessible. But I can see the post fine now on my cellphone, so it doesn’t seem like it’s redirecting to itself.

    I’ll take a closer look shortly when I get to a PC.

    George Appiah

    (@gappiah)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    OK, here we go with the deep dive I promised:

    There’s a 301 redirection all right, but not to itself.

    Take a closer look at the Request URL and the Location URL (the latter being the same as the destination URL displayed in the address bar) in the screenshot below.

    Let’s stack them up vertically so the difference will be clear:

    https://www.ross.no/2024/08/06/sandveld-ragwort-senecio-arenarius/
https://www.ross.no/2024/08/26/sandveld-ragwort-senecio-arenarius/

    Do you see they’re different URLs now? The requested URL has the day 06 (6th August 2024), while the destination URL has the date 26 (26th August 2024).

    But the archive page for 6th August 20204 — https://www.ross.no/2024/08/06/ — returns 404: Not Found — meaning there was not a single post published on this day.

    This means the URL https://www.ross.no/2024/08/06/sandveld-ragwort-senecio-arenarius/ does not exist at all and should normally return 404. WordPress is merely being helpful by redirecting the request for this non-existing post to a post with the same slug sandveld-ragwort-senecio-arenarius but published on the 26th.

    So you should NOT want to index https://www.ross.no/2024/08/06/sandveld-ragwort-senecio-arenarius/ since it simply does not exist!

    Does any of this make at all? 😀

    Thread Starter Morten Ross

    (@rosmo01)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Don’t know how I missed the date difference – thanks for pointing that out!

    That said I don’t now why Google Search Console is reporting a redirect error for this page, as that is the reason I opened this ticket. I have other posts that have a legitimate change in the date, which are indexed, and the old date/url is listed in User-declared canonical.

    How to return 410, so Google will remove it from Search Console Redirect error property without having to install a plugin for it?

    George Appiah

    (@gappiah)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Sorry for taking 4 lifetimes to reply: life got in the way 😀

    How to return 410, so Google will remove it from Search Console Redirect error property without having to install a plugin for it?

    If you’re using the PRO version of the AIOSEO plugin, the built-in redirection feature can do this: https://aioseo.com/docs/choosing-which-redirect-type-to-use/

    Other than that, you may use a dedicated redirection plugin, or do this directly on your webserver (Apache/Nginx configuration code).

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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