Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1145/3717867.371792

Publication Title

Websci '25: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Web Science Conference 2025

Pages

249-260

Conference Name

Websci '25: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Web Science Conference 2025, 20-24 May 2025, New Brunswick, New Jersey

Abstract

URI redirections are integral to web management, supporting structural changes, SEO optimization, and security. However, their complexities affect usability, SEO performance, and digital preservation. This study analyzed 11 million unique redirecting URIs, following redirections up to 10 hops per URI, to uncover patterns and implications of redirection practices. Our findings revealed that 50% of the URIs terminated successfully, while 50% resulted in errors, including 0.06% exceeding 10 hops. Canonical redirects, such as HTTP to HTTPS transitions, were prevalent, reflecting adherence to SEO best practices. Non-canonical redirects, often involving domain or path changes, highlighted significant web migrations, rebranding, and security risks. Notable patterns included “sink” URIs, where multiple redirects converged, ranging from traffic consolidation by global websites to deliberate “Rickrolling.” The study also identified 62,000 custom 404 URIs, almost half being soft 404s, which could compromise SEO and user experience. These findings underscore the critical role of URI redirects in shaping the web while exposing challenges such as outdated URIs, server instability, and improper error handling. This research offers a detailed analysis of URI redirection practices, providing insights into their prevalence, types, and outcomes. By examining a large dataset, we highlight inefficiencies in redirection chains and examine patterns such as the use of “sink” URIs and custom error pages. This information can help webmasters, researchers, and digital archivists improve web usability, optimize resource allocation, and safeguard valuable online content.

Rights

© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/authors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.

Original Publication Citation

Garg, K., Alam, S., Ayala, D., Weigle, M. C., Nelson, M. L. (2025). Not here, go there: Analyzing redirection patterns on the web. In M. Twyman, S. Rajtmajer, V. K. Singh, F. Morstatter, H. Liu, J. Sun, K. Ognyanova, M. Weber (Eds.), Websci '25: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Web Science Conference 2025 (pp. 249-260). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3717867.3717925

ORCID

0000-0001-6498-7391 (Garg), 0000-0002-2787-7166 (Weigle), 0000-0003-3749-8116 (Nelson)

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