A redirected URL (301 permanent or 302 temporary) is a page position change where users interact with a new URL instead of the original. If your pages open quickly and without errors, people and browsers will not notice any rearrangements.
What Does “Resource URL Redirect Broken” Mean?
This issue means that the URL in question is a resource URL that redirects to a URL that is not accessible. Such problematic pages are bad for SEO and users.
You can also find out more about redirecting URLs here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/301-redirects
What Triggers This Issue?
This problem can arise for various reasons, and here are the most common ones:
- Your server is overloaded or misconfigured
- Or it’s a temporary issue due to some maintenance on your website’s server
You can also watch a video by John Mueller and discover the different factors that go into canonicalization and what happens when you trigger a 301 redirect:
How to Check the Issue?
You can check this issue with online or offline tools that scan your site. They can identify page resource URLs that redirect, where the destination URLs return HTTP status codes of 4XX or 5XX.
For example, Sitechecker keeps track of pages that redirect to URLs that respond 4xx client error or 5xx server error.
You can receive a list of such pages with ability to view their internal backlinks.
Why is This Important?
If your WordPress website has a broken redirect, search engine crawlers won’t access the page content to index it. Moreover, users will not get the necessary information on your site, and they will search for content from competitors. Therefore, you need to resolve this issue for your pages to work properly quickly.
Checking Broken redirects is important for your site’s health!
Conduct a full audit to find out and fix your technical SEO.
How to Fix the Issue?
- For 4xx HTTP status codes, you need to create a replacement file on a new URL and fix all incoming references to point to the new URL. You can remove all incoming references to the redirected URL if the resource cannot be replaced.
- For 5xx HTTP status codes, you may reproduce this server error in your browser. Besides, you need to check the error logs for your server.
