Does anyone else have this problem?
Many of the redirects I’ve set up using YAML file are flagged as redirect errors by Google Search Console.
There are 550 redirects at the moment and 411 errors, but that second number climbs by 20 or so every time GSC refreshes its data.
Google’s documentation says the fault means one of the following:
- A redirect chain that was too long
- A redirect loop
- A redirect URL that eventually exceeded the max URL length
- A bad or empty URL in the redirect chain
I’ve checked this with third party tools and they look good.
In my case the redirects are rarely more than a one step straightforward 301 redirect. We can rule out item 1 on the list.
There are no loops.
The URLs never get long.
There can’t be bad or empty URLs because in 90% of the cases there is no chain. And when there is a chain it is only two steps.
Is there some other reason Google doesn’t like these redirects?
I noticed these errors only started appearing when I switched from Json redirects to YAML. Could that be the problem?