"Page With Redirect" issue for index document

Question

I use the Pelican static site generator with Attila which automatically creates a page for each of my site's categories (/categories.html).

The default configuration for Attila created category URLs - and canonicals, for each category without a trailing slash.

e.g.

https://example.com/category/coins

...vs.

https://example.com/category/coins/

This led to a Page Redirect issue:

Search Console has identified that your site is affected by 1 Page indexing issue(s). The following issues were found on your site.

Top Issues

Page with redirect
We recommend that you fix these issues when possible to enable the best experience and coverage in Google Search.

I edited my site such that the Canonical uses the full URL. If, for example, you go to

https://example.com/category/coins

The browser redirects to

https://example.com/category/coins/

And the page source includes:

<link href="https://example.com/category/coins/index.html" rel="canonical" />

In addition, I updated all my sitemaps to point to the full URL (trailing with index.html) and all internal links point to the full URL.

I then clicked Validate Fix on the Google Search Console and the validation failed.

I'm concerned that the coins path (without trailing slash) returns a 302 and not 301 response.

I really don't care if Google indexes that page, but I took a significant hit on impressions after Google alerted me to the Page with Redirect issue.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to validate this Page with redirect issue?

Answer 1

The only way to successfully "validate/fix" the "Page redirect" issue is to prevent the redirect that appends the trailing slash. This would be relatively trivial to resolve on something like Apache/.htaccess, but I don't believe this is possible with Amazon S3.

The 302 (temporary) redirect is also problematic (any redirect would be problematic), but the 302 is not cached by the client, so users would be repeatedly redirected via the server every time they click on a link (even the same link). Which is what Google is warning about.

The alternative is to change your URLs throughout and use the "canonical" URL with the trailing slash. (And ignore the "Page redirect" warning in GSC.) You should not be using the URL with index.html (the index document). Including index.html in the visible URL is just not necessary and clutters the URL.

(Although if you have already exposed index.html then it may be more work to try and remove it. Although I believe Amazon S3 does support redirects.)

Answer 2

Many of the errors in the pages report in Google Search Console aren't things that need to be validated or can be validated fully. Page with redirect being one of them. If a URL was previously indexed and you add a 301 redirect to the URL it will stay in this page with a redirect report. For instance, if you have a domain.com/sample-blog-post but later decide you want to move all your blog posts to a subdirectory, such as /blog, then your domain.com/blog/sample-blog-post will now be indexed, but domain.com/sample-blog-post will show up in the page with redirect report. This is perfectly harmless and to be expected.

It takes some time for search engines to crawl the URLs, understand the redirect relationships and restore traffic flow. I suggest requesting manual indexing on both the previous URL and the new canonical destination URL to speed up the process.

Video showing how to request manual indexing