How do redirects affect my store's SEO and search rankings?

Summary

Redirects play a critical role in maintaining your Shopify store's SEO health. When pages move, get deleted, or generate 404 errors, search engines and visitors lose access to valuable content — which can hurt your rankings, crawl efficiency, and user experience. The Nabu Redirect Manager helps you detect broken links and create the right type of redirect to preserve link equity, retain traffic, and protect your search visibility.

This article explains how each redirect type in the app impacts SEO and what to keep in mind when setting them up.

How Redirects Impact SEO?

1. Preserving Link Equity (Page Authority)

When external sites link to a page on your store and that page returns a 404, you lose the SEO value those backlinks provide. Creating a redirect from the broken URL to a relevant live page transfers most of that link equity to the new destination — helping the new page rank better.

2. Reducing Crawl Errors

Search engines like Google allocate a limited crawl budget to your store. A high number of 404 errors signals poor site health and wastes crawl budget on dead pages. Fixing broken links through redirects ensures crawlers spend time on pages that actually matter.

3. Improving User Experience

Visitors who land on a 404 page typically bounce immediately. Bounce signals can indirectly affect rankings. Redirects keep users on your store by sending them to a working, relevant page instead.

4. Recovering Lost Traffic

The Broken 404 Visits metric on the app homepage shows how many real visits your broken pages received in the last 30 days. Each of these visits is a lost opportunity — a redirect converts them back into usable traffic.

Best Practices for SEO-Friendly Redirects

1. Prioritize Shopify (static) redirects for high-value URLs — Pages with backlinks, organic traffic, or indexed status should always use Shopify-synced 404 redirects.
2. Match the redirect target to user intent — Redirect a broken product URL to a similar product or its parent collection, not to the homepage. Irrelevant redirects can be treated as soft 404s by Google.
3. Monitor the Fixed Links metric — The homepage Fixed Links card (rolling 30-day) shows how many broken links you've successfully redirected. A rising trend indicates improving site health.
4. Use the Ignored tab carefully — Marking a broken link as Ignored stops it from appearing in Unresolved 404s, but the underlying 404 still exists. Only ignore URLs that are intentionally removed and have no SEO value.
5. Use Wildcard/RegEx for cleanup, not core SEO — These are best for bulk redirection of legacy URL patterns where individual static redirects would be impractical. For ranking-critical pages, always create a Shopify redirect.
6. Avoid redirect chains — Redirect a 404 directly to its final destination rather than to another URL that also redirects.

Updated on: 13/05/2026