: 301 redirects in main navigation menu of WordPress website - is this okay for SEO? I want to allow a client to have a flexible way to configure the navigation menu for his WordPress website.

@Phylliss660

This is a perfectly sensible thing to do, and your pages will be indexed just fine.
For pretty much all practical purposes, search engines treat links to a 301-redirected URL just as if the link had pointed directly to the target URL.

In the past, Google's PageRank algorithm used to shave off a small fraction of the rank flowing through redirected links, but apparently that's no longer the case. In any case, the amount was never greater than the fraction shaved off on every step in a normal chain of links. In practice, this is not something you should worry about — that time is much better spent making your site's link structure generally easy to navigate, or promoting your site through external links.

A more serious issue is with chains of redirects, where you have page A redirecting to B, B to C, C to D, and so on. Not only does that kind of redirect chaining increase the time it takes for a browser to follow that link, but if the chain is very long, then at some point both search engines and browsers will give up and stop following it. For most browsers, it'll typically takes about a 100 or so hops before they give up, but in this video Matt Cutts seems to be implying that the threshold for Googlebot may be much lower, perhaps as low as five hops.

In any case, 301 redirects are everywhere. Ever visit a directory on your site and have the trailing slash automatically appended to the URL? That's a 301 redirect. Follow a short link to a Stack Exchange question or to a blog post? 301 redirect. URL shorteners? Yeah, they use 301 redirects too. You just don't notice them, because your browser follows them automatically and all but invisibly. If search engines didn't do the same, they wouldn't be very good at crawling the web.

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@Jennifer507

You only want to use redirects when there's no other option. Secondly, there's several bad issues you might run into like the keywords in the URL and XML sitemap issues by doing it this way.

Personally, I would either use the menu manager to control the navigation, or modify the theme files to display the proper pages (potentially as their added as well) rather than using redirects.

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