Google has vastly expanded its help document on how various redirects impact your site's performance in Google Search. The document even mentions "Crypto redirects" which to me seems like a new term but just means a way to communicate in normal language that a page was moved.
You can find the revised redirects Google Search page there and it is broken into these categories:
- Overview of redirects
- Server side redirects
- Permanent server side redirects
- Temporary server side redirects
- How to implement server side redirects with Apache, NGINX etc
- meta refresh and its HTTP equivalent including instant and delayed
- JavaScript location redirects
- Crypto redirects
- Alternate versions of a URL
What is a Crypto redirect? Google said "If you can't implement any of the traditional redirect methods, you should still make an effort to let your users know that the page or its content has moved. The simplest way to do this is to add a link pointing to the new page accompanied by a short explanation."
Crypto-404s & related are pretty old -- this isn't something new we made up. Matt mentions them in 2006. https://t.co/tkKRhnVjhZ
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 30, 2021
That people are selling power cycles in the name of "crypto" nowadays is kinda cryptic, but names evolve.
Somehow we kept "crypto" internally for most of these kinds of things (there's more than just redirects & 404s), but soft-404 seems to have been established externally. It's cryptic. Should we call them soft-redirects and leave crypto-redirects to a short life? or is that weird?
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 30, 2021
Here is what the old page looked like (it was very short) - click to enlarge:
If you are doing any redirects, reference this document.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
