AI Search
Google’s John Mueller said he would “caution against assuming that you need to do this level of analysis for all URLs on a website in order to achieve optimal SEO” when it comes to reviewing bad redirects or CSP settings. Why, because bad redirects or CSP settings are often simply visible when doing normal browsing, and if you see it, then that is enough analysis.
In short, you don’t need fancy SEO tools or features to find issues with bad redirects or CSP settings because you would likely see those anyway when just using your web browser and visiting those URLs.
John said this in a Reddit thread asking about if “auditing redirect chains in DevTools a massive time-sink.” The answer is, yes, it can be.
John wrote:
There are a bunch of browser extensions that do this already (eg Redirect Path from Ayima is one I see a lot in screenshots, and CSP is very different from redirects, so I don’t understand the connection). I don’t recall a time when I ran into something like this causing SEO issues which weren’t also visible to average users in their browsers.
I use Redirect Path from Ayima, it is a nice browser extension.
John goes into why it may be fun to dig in:
This is not to discourage you from digging into minute technical details, chasing through rabbit holes, and then making tools to make it easier for you :-). I have also spent days & weeks analyzing technical quirks & puzzles that in the end I realized ultimately don’t matter, but which were “fun” (only 1/4 was done out of spite) & somewhat educational along the way. It’s probably not healthy to over-fixate on these things, but I learn minutiae (that will never really matter, I know).
But ultimately, it is probably overkill, especially for SEO – John wrote:
This is mostly just to say I applaud your desire to understand all of these details, it’s not unreasonable to practice digging into this from time to time, but I’d caution against assuming that you need to do this level of analysis for all URLs on a website in order to achieve optimal SEO/EtcO. There are many things that can subtly & invisibly go wrong with websites, but usually bad redirects or CSP settings will generally be very visible to people using browsers.
Forum discussion at Reddit.
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