301 Redirects
301 redirects are an essential part of managing a website. If you remove a page, change a URL or restructure your website, a 301 redirect allows you to send visitors and search engines from an old address to a new one.
But while having 301 redirects is perfectly normal, it's generally bad practice to have internal links on your website pointing to URLs that redirect.
What is an internal redirect?
Imagine you originally had a page at:
/seo-training-course
You later change the URL to:
/seo-training
You correctly create a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.
However, somewhere else on your website you still have a link pointing to /seo-training-course.
When a visitor or search engine follows that link, this happens:
Page A → Old URL → 301 Redirect → New URL
Instead, your internal link should be updated so that it goes directly to the destination:
Page A → New URL
The 301 redirect should remain in place for visitors, search engines and external websites that may still use the old address, but your own website shouldn't need to use it.
Why are internal 301 redirects a problem?
A single internal 301 redirect is unlikely to cause any significant SEO problems. Google can follow redirects and understands that pages and URLs change.
Nevertheless, there are several good reasons to clean them up.
1. They create unnecessary requests
Every redirect requires another HTTP request before the browser or search engine reaches the final page.
Instead of requesting one URL, it has to request the original URL, receive the redirect instruction and then request the destination.
Individually, the difference may be tiny, but there's no reason to introduce unnecessary requests when the internal link can simply point directly to the destination.
2. They waste crawl resources
Search engines have finite resources available for crawling websites.
For a small website, a handful of redirected internal links probably won't make any meaningful difference. On a website containing hundreds of thousands or millions of URLs, however, unnecessary redirects can contribute to inefficient crawling.
A clean internal linking structure makes it easier for search engines to discover and crawl the URLs that actually matter.
3. Redirects can become redirect chains
This is potentially the bigger problem.
Suppose /page-a redirects to /page-b. A year later, /page-b is replaced by /page-c.
You could eventually end up with:
/page-a → /page-b → /page-c
These redirect chains create additional requests and unnecessary complexity.
Updating internal links to point directly to the current URL helps prevent these chains accumulating over time.
Should you remove the 301 redirect?
Usually, no.
The problem isn't necessarily the redirect itself. The redirect may still be needed because people have bookmarked the old URL, external websites may link to it and search engines may still know about it.
Instead, find the internal pages linking to the redirected URL and update those links so they point directly to the final destination.
How to find internal links pointing to redirects
This is where an SEO crawler is particularly useful.
Crawl your website and identify internal URLs returning a 3xx HTTP status code. You should then be able to see which pages contain links to those redirected URLs.
For each one, check the redirect destination and, where appropriate, change the internal link to point directly to the final URL.
You don't need to panic if your website has a few internal 301 redirects. They aren't an SEO disaster.
But they are unnecessary, and cleaning them up gives you a faster, simpler and more maintainable internal linking structure — which is exactly what a well-managed website should have.