Phantom Redirect

[Kookjay]

Hi guys,

I just found a 301 on my site going from a URL that I have never previously had live to my home page.

I have checked through my redirection plug in, htaccess file and had the guys at Site Ground try track down the 301, but can not seem to find out where it is coming from.

The post/page with the URL being redirected 100% does not and has never existed before. It has not been indexed by Google and is not in my sitemap.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Many thanks

 

[illmasterj]

Run it through http://www.redirect-checker.org/ and see if it tells more of the story. It might be happening on your local machine but not to anyone else

Make sure you flush your dns on your machine and check your local hosts file too.

 

[CCarter]

If you are using Wordpress it could be the CMS. When you update a URL (slug), due to misspellings or title change, the old URL automatically redirects to the new URL. It has been doing this since dawn of time.

Example: Update URL from “/post-A/“ to “/post-B/“ - post-A will 301 redirect to post-B, no plugin is involved. If you then update “/post-B/“ to “/post-C/“ then post-A will now redirect to post-C automatically.

Search inside your MYSQL database for that URL, it’ll be there. I am not sure how to remove it, perhaps delete revisions of the post.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Close misspellings of slugs get redirected on Wordpress too.

Otherwise, check your .htaccess file too. That's another place redirects can hide.

 

[Kookjay]

Thank you so much for your answers guys!

I managed to figure this out. This is a little embarrassing though.

I am using Wordpress and I have a SEO plug in called Rank Math. Within Rank Math you can set up redirects. I thought I might as well try and deactivate the plugin it and see what happens.

The 301 stopped straight away and it loaded an image with that slug.

It seems Rank Math was automatically redirecting the image to my home page for some reason. The strange thing is I used the above advice and search inside my MYSQL Database and couldn't find anything with that slug or file name :S

Thanks again for your help guys!