TL/DR: You can now filter by Redirected URLs in the Site Explorer Pages tab.

When someone links to a webpage, they may not always use the exact target URL that you’d like. They may add parameters, link to the http version (rather than https), or maybe even accidentally link to an older version of the page. Maybe they linked to your site five years ago, and while you’ve redirected their landing URL, it’s still slightly annoying that the link hasn’t been updated.

For all of these reasons, and more, the Site Explorer Pages tab shows you ALL of the linked-to target URLs we have found for any website or subdomain.  As you can imagine, some domains can have many hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of incoming target URLs that they have accumulated over the years.

After an excellent customer query, we have started to draft a blog post that explains why we don’t collapse the data into a vastly smaller, “Pages” number.  Spoiler: it’s NOT to inflate our numbers. Watch this space.

To help you filter Page URLs down, we’re delighted to share that we’ve added a brand new Redirected URL filter for you to use. To see how it works, and why it’s different to the existing URL search filter, consider this setup.

At the moment, when you filter by URL on the Pages tab, you filter the list of top internal pages (the red pages in the middle space, above).  From today, you can instead choose to search through the landing URLs that are specifically used in your target pages (blue pages, above).

Why would you want to do this?

• Find Internal redirects (and External redirects)
• Site migration
• Find hidden 404s and other pages
• Uncover redirect “backlinks” for a page
• Verify insecure and www/non-www redirects
• Check canonicals are properly configured

Read on to find out more.

Find Internal Redirects (and External Redirects)

You can use the new Redirected URL filter to check to see which of your page URLs forward to internal redirects. All you have to do search by Redirected URL, and add your domain name as the search term.

In this example, we share how someone…

• Checks out minecraft.net on the Site Explorer Pages tab
• Chooses the “URL” filter from the top filter bar
• Selects, “contains,” from the Redirected URL drop-down
• Enters the same domain, “minecraft.net,” into the Redirected URL text box

When they choose Go, they will see a list that contains only internal redirects. Pretty neat.

And there’s more! For power users, the magic happens when you invert the search type.

Instead of asking Majestic to show you the redirect hops that point to your own domain, you can instead ask to see external redirects that are sent off-site.

To do this, repeat the steps, above, but choose to see Redirected URLs that do not contain the domain name.

Here’s some examples from minecraft.net, where on-site redirects send visitors off to the different domains, minecrafthopper.net and bugs.mojang.com.

Site Migration Part 1

The marketing agency Digiloft published an excellent domain migration success story for the e-commerce brand Outdoor Toys. In their article, they emphasise the importance of proper redirect mapping to avoid redirect chains. 

“Redirects are perhaps the most important thing to get right during a migration … not via redirect chains”.

The new filter is a perfect way to quickly check redirects, and learn where to start.

At the time of writing, Majestic has 693 redirected URLs for outdoortoys.co.uk. A quick check suggests that like they do indeed all redirect to the new .com domain.

Everything appears to be in order, but just in case, let’s double-check if there are any that still point to the .co.uk domain.

To do this…

• Search for Redirected URLs that contain the same domain name as the one you’re looking at.
• If there are no results, then there are no old redirects that still point to the old domain.

If we do have results, it will suggest that our crawlers (and potentially some customers) are still making their way to the old domain name.

Excellent. There are no remaining detected page URLs that still point to the old domain.

We can see Digiloft did an excellent job redirecting all URLs to the new platform!

Site Migration Part 2 (Majestic SEO to Majestic)

In 2014, Majestic SEO rebranded to Majestic, migrating the whole site from majesticseo.com to majestic.com.

We can use the same method to see if there is anything redirect-related that we missed.

On the Pages tab for majesticseo.com, we’re going to look for any redirected URLs that do not contain “majestic.com”. This should give us a list of redirects that do not go to our primary domain name.

Oh. There are lots of hits.

It looks like these redirects are from an ancient restructure of the site, moving some of our very, very earliest pages away from a php platform.  Despite these redirects being about 15 years old, in all that time, they have been diligently redirecting from the old php structure to the new structure, and then redirect again to the new domain.  It obviously works but, as these redirect chains increase loading time and consume search engine crawl budget, it’s something we need to address.

Knowing which pages don’t redirect directly is a perfect starting point for this type of work.  Once you have identified that you may have a redirect or crawl problem, you could use a tool like Screaming Frog to see redirect chains in more depth.  Screaming Frog also has Majestic integration to check the stats of your pages as you go.

Find hidden 404s and other pages

To demonstrate how you can find pages on any site that send our crawler to your 404 pages, let’s take a look at the Pages tab for womenintechseo.com. 

If you’ve clicked through to try that demo, you may not see the line of filters in the following screenshot. If this is the case, use the Filters toggle underneath the search box to switch from Preset to Custom.

Applying the long-established Crawl Result filter shows that there is only one 404 page. And it has no inbound links.

However, seeing that this is a dedicated 404 page without any inbound external links, and our crawler has found it, it’s safe to assume that there are some internal links and redirects that point here.

To see if we’ve found any redirects, you can switch to the redirect filter and search for the 404 page.  Now you can see the top URLs that send our crawler to the 404 page!

You can use this technique for other kinds of pages that use the same structure.

Maybe you could also use this to find link opportunities. Think of a blog or news site for your niche. Can you find legacy page redirects that receive links but forward users straight to the site’s 404 page?

Uncover redirect “backlinks” for a page

Majestic’s bread and butter is external backlinks.  As we shared in the diagram at the start of this post, sometimes backlinks don’t go directly to the target page.

We can build on the previous technique to find “hidden” backlinks.

In 2018, Boston Tea Party, a “family of cafes” in the UK made the decision to stop serving takeaway hot drinks in single use cups. 

For the sake of this exercise, let’s pretend they plan to re-organise their website and want to remove the page at https://bostonteaparty.co.uk/our-story/cups/.

As we haven’t found any external backlinks that point directly to this page, they would be safe to delete it, right?

Well, not quite.

You can use the Redirected URL filter and see a different story.  There are many pages with many backlinks that redirect to the target page. 

Verify insecure and www/non-www redirects

The homepage variants graph on the Site Explorer Summary tab shows that Google’s preference is for www over non-www.

The vast majority of pages abide by this but, there are some outliers that instead redirect the, “wrong way,” from the preferred www subdomain back to the root domain, non-www, version.

You can check this by searching Redirected URLs for the text string, “://google.com”.

Here are some matches of pages on google.com that have a redirect back to a non-www version.

While we compiled this post, we wondered what happens now to each of these URLs.

When we opened the first individual URL into the Pages tab, we seen that it redirects back to the www subdomain!

• http://www.google.com/mars
• 301 >>
• https://google.com/maps/space/mars
• 301 >>
• https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars

That’s one unnecessary redirect that could be removed.

Check canonicals are configured properly 

Majestic has recently tidied its canonical redirects. 

URLs that have the correct data source, options, and filters are important but that’s a lot of “pages” to confuse search engines.  By labelling canonical URL versions, search engines can know which parameters are different pages and which are different views of the same page data.

We can use the new Redirected URL filter to check these canonicals. 

Most of the time, for majestic.com, we want a canonical URL that contains no query parameters.  We use the new filter and check to see if our redirected URLs contain some of our popular parameters.

1. Visit the Pages tab for majestic.com
2. From the Crawl Result filter, choose “Redirect Canonical”
3. From the URL > Redirected URL filter, choose contains “scope”

Note, “scope” is one of our most-used Site Explorer parameter names. If you try this for your own site, remember to change the word ‘scope’ for one of your own parameter names.

Excellent! The word “scope” doesn’t appear in the landing URLs for any of our top internal canonically redirected URLs. If we were performing a full audit, we could repeat the steps for more of our high-volume parameters.

How to access Redirected URL filters

Now that you know we’ve got them, we hope that you can think of some cool things you can do with redirect filters.

Full access to the new filter is available today for all Majestic subscribers. The number of top page URLs available to search will depend on your subsciption level. (Look for ‘Site Explorer Data Rows’ in Plans and Pricing.)

To use the new filter, first go to the Pages tab for any domain or subdomain search. Then, from the Filter row, choose URL and enter your search into the Redirected URL box.

We recommend that you use the tab for domain or subdomain searches, because while it does work for URL searches, as you’re only looking at a single URL, you won’t see many insightful results!

If you don’t have a Majestic subscription, you can always try out the new filter with this week’s free demo site. Click this link to jump straight to the Pages tab. Remember to look under the search box and change your Filters setting from ‘Preset’ from ‘Custom’ !

As ever, we look forward to your suggestions, observations, and we’d love to hear if this solves any problems that you’re working on. Comments are open on this blog post, and we are also happy to receive your feedback through our customer success team.

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