37% of Small Business Backlinks Depend on a Redirect vs 15% for Established Brands

A local chamber of commerce linked to a landscaping company's website in 2015, back when the address started with http:// and had no www. The company has since moved to https://www and its old address redirects to the new one, so the link still works. It works only as long as that redirect survives, and the next host move or redesign is exactly when redirects get dropped.

Backlinks, links from other websites to yours, are one of the main signals Google uses to rank pages, and they are slow to earn. A redirect passes a link's value on to the new address, but each one is another setting that can break. Knowing how much of your link profile depends on redirects tells you how careful the next change to your website needs to be.

For small businesses the answer is: a lot. 36.6% of backlinks to small business websites reach their page only through a redirect, and for 37.7% of small businesses, redirects carry half or more of their links. Established brands depend on them far less, with a median of 15%.

On September 23, 2026 we collected up to 1,000 live backlinks for each of 231 randomly chosen US small business websites, 60,495 text and image links in all, and recorded the response of the address each link points at. For links that reach their page through a redirect, we compared the linked address with the final one to classify why the redirect exists. We ran a comparable measure for 472 established brands.

A redirect automatically sends a visitor from one web address to another. A link "depends on a redirect" when the address it points at no longer holds the page and forwards visitors to where the page lives now. A 301 redirect is permanent and tells search engines to credit the new address; a 302 is temporary.

Half of all backlinks to small business websites, 50.1%, land directly on a working page. 36.6% go through a redirect, and 13.2% point at a page that returns an error and pass nothing at all. Half of all small business backlinks either depend on a redirect or are already broken.

Established brands are far less exposed. The median established brand has 15% of its backlinks passing through a redirect, against 22.7% for the median small business website. A small business link profile has more riding on settings that one host move can erase.

Most redirected links are a side effect of basic housekeeping. 40% exist because the website switched between its www and bare address, 24% because it moved from http:// to https:// and 4% because it did both. Another 24% point at a different domain entirely, usually after a rebrand or a domain change, and 8% at an old page address on the same website.

Almost all of them use the right kind of redirect. 91.7% return a permanent 301, which search engines treat as a lasting move and credit to the new address, and 5.1% use a temporary 302. The weakness is not the type of redirect but where it lives: www and HTTPS redirects usually sit in server settings, not in the website itself, so they are easy to lose in a move.

The median small business website has 22.7% of its backlinks going through redirects, but the average is 38.8%, because a large group depends on them heavily. For the 37.7% of small businesses that get half or more of their links this way, a lost redirect would cut off most of their backlinks in one step.

That risk is highest at the moments small businesses change their websites most: a new host, a new website builder or a new domain. Each of those can reset server settings, and the redirects that keep old links working go with them unless someone carries them over.

Keep every existing redirect when you change hosts, platforms or designers. The http to https and www redirects are the easiest to forget because they live in server settings, not in your website builder. After launch, test them by clicking a few of your oldest backlinks and checking that each lands on the right page.

Where you control the linking page, such as a directory listing, a supplier's partner page or your own social profiles, update the link to point at your current address and remove the dependency. Our seo migration services list every redirect your backlinks rely on before a move, so none of them disappears with the old server.

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