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I use BigCommerce, and they have a system where all the URLs are dynamically generated from the name of each product. So if I named a product "widget x y z" the url would be /widget-x-y-z/, and if I changed that to "blue widget x y z", it would change to /blue-widget-x-y-z/ and automatically redirect the old one to the new one.

As a result, in 6 months, because of a lot of tweaking and experimenting, I've ended up with a hefty list of 400 redirects. Some of them are very old, and some are recent. So my question is in two parts:

a) does having all of these redirects hurt my rankings?

b) if so, would deleting them help?

Hi Devanur,

Thank you for the encouraging words. Sticking out is actually the hardest part! You need to dig a little into your pockets to do that, so you can get impatient at times

PS - thanks for reading the blog and your kind words, it means a lot!

Hey Doug,

Thanks for such an in-depth answer. Its interesting that you mention the long tail - a lot of my existing traffic is coming from long tail keywords, but like you said, it's hard to convert those visitors.

One thing I can think of to improve the rankings of individual products is to try and funnel link juice from the high-ranking long tail pages to relevant product pages. Do you think that could help?

About 90% of organic traffic is new visitors.

I run an eCommerce store and have a decent number of quality links pointing to it(which is still growing). It's been 6 months since I started it, and I'm getting between 100-120 organic visits per day right now. I've had a few more quality guest post/infographic links, and I'm also focusing on optimizing individual pages, but my traffic still seems to have plateaued.

I'm beginning to doubt that more links is the answer. All of my content is unique(no manufacturer descriptions) and I'm still being outranked by sites that have spammier link profiles and copy/paste descriptions.

Any thoughts?

Completely agree with you, Oleg.

I've got two wikipedia links back to my website and I get a fairly regular stream of traffic from them as referring sources, and those visitors are the most engaged, too, averaging at least 5 to 10 minutes per visit!

Completely agree with you, Oleg.

I've got two wikipedia links back to my website and I get a fairly regular stream of traffic from them as referring sources, and those visitors are the most engaged, too, averaging at least 5 to 10 minutes per visit!