Why multiple redirects are a bad thing in SEO strategy.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last few years, everyone knows about Nextdoor.com. It is a good platform that has some serious growth potential. So tonight I jumped on the site and wanted to check out the SEO they are doing, it has to be cutting edge right? 

I wanted to get an idea of how many pages they had in Google, I thought they would have over a billion, I was mildly surprised to see roughly 2m pages indexed. Then I saw that they are doing some international stuff using subdomains, I have gone into that in the past and how badly that is as well. 

I was impressed that they are doing international SEO, I love international SEO, it is difficult, nuanced and has many facets that confuse many SEOs. When I clicked into the site on the AU subdomain I was very surprised to see how many redirects were firing. Yes I was logged into the .com platform but should have I been redirected back to .com? I wanted to visit .au, I wanted to visit that platform. What if I have more than one home? In another country?

If I am not logged in then it correctly takes me to https://au.nextdoor.com/ without firing a redirect. I am not opposed to the redirect but three 302 redirects seems excessive. 

When looking at the sitemap for AU, the engineering looped all of the URL’s into the en-sitemap, that is kinda weird and should be on a sitemap all by itself.

Looking at other companies and doing short mini SEO audits are a great way to see what other SEOs are doing or not doing. I have picked up some great tricks over the years by looking at other sites not in the industry I have been working in.

Back to the redirects, at a past role there were literally redirects on redirects for chains that no joke one was over 20 redirects which seemed insane. Why would Googlebot want to crawl that many? Hint - it does not like lots of redirects. Why anyone would create redirect chains is beyond me. We broke every redirect, yep that was not easy and then reset every redirect so there were not more than a 301 to a 200, not a 301 - 301 - 301 - 301 - 200. Just one jump is all you should have. If you are gonna have a 302 that should be for bidirectional redirects and a few other edge cases. If you are gonna never come back and fix that page, just use a 301. If you are creating multiple redirects you are creating more issues for yourself and your SEO plan. Breaking all of our bad redirects that were created by folks almost caused the site to crash as before Google was confused and we could tell was having a difficult time with crawling, then Google saw we cleaned it up and Google went nuts. Traffic started to rapidly increase and we made more money. Make your SEO simple, don't over complicate it.