301 vs 302
-
We recently launched a redesign and I noticed from running a crawl using Screaming Frog SEO that our redirects are all being seen as 302. I know 302 is a temporary redirect, but does this hurt SEO rankings when all our redirects are being seen as 302s instead of 301s?
Also, the way I implemented the redirects was by using the IIS Manager Tool. Is it possible that our IIS Manager Tool is not configured properly and instead of adding the redirect as 301, it is inserting it into the rewrite file as 302s?
-
Good to know!
-
302 is temporary. Its possible that the IIS Manager tool is not configured or check command to make it 301
All the best !
-
I'm in complete agreement that a 301 instead of a 302 is the best practice here, but wanted to point out that 302s do not necessarily pass no page rank at all. Check out this test study by Geoff Kenyon which dispels the theory that 302 pass no page rank at all, but clearly 301 is preferable in most cases.
-
A 302 is a temporary redirect. A good use of a 302 is when you have a form submission and want to redirect from the processing page. A 302 does not flow any page rank.
A 301 is a permanent redirect. Search engines obey this directive that page1.html is now page2.html. It will not only de-index page1.html but move most of the rank page1.html had over to page2.html.
If you're using IIS7 or later you should be able to easily add a 301.
-
All redirects should be a 301 in order to pass link benifits of the legacy page. You will still lose some link juice through a 301 but a 302 shall not pass benefits heres another thread on this topic.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself
Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!0 -
Two websites vs. one for SEO
I recently met with a new potential client who currently has two websites for his business - one that is for the business as a whole and another that is specific to one of his particular services (his main service and what the overall business is known for). My first question was "why do you have two websites?" His response was that he has had a really hard time ranking well organically for his main service. He worked with an SEO company for two years and never was able to establish a solid organic presence for searches related to his main service - so he went ahead and had a site built to focus specifically on that service with the hope that it would help him rank organically for searches related to that service. The new site was built very recently (Dec. 2014) and it hasn't had a lot of optimization work put into it. The original site has a much higher Domain Authority, more incoming links, etc. My typical preference has always been to use one website and drive all traffic to that site, while building out specific content for any products/services on individual pages of the site. For some reason I'm torn as to what to do with this particular situation since his main concern is ranking for his core service, which hasn't happened with the original site. I'm concerned, though, that optimizing and managing two websites will be less effective than driving all of the traffic to one site, and that it could actually be detrimental overall. What are your thoughts? Suggestions? Feel free to let me know if you need any more details.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
Broken sitemaps vs no sitemaps at all?
The site I am working on is enormous. We have 71 sitemap files, all linked to from a sitemap index file. The sitemaps are not up to par with "best practices" yet, and realistically it may be another month or so until we get them cleaned up. I'm wondering if, for the time being, we should just remove the sitemaps from Webmaster Tools altogether. They are currently "broken", and I know that sitemaps are not mandatory. Perhaps they're doing more harm than good at this point? According to Webmaster Tools, there are 8,398,082 "warnings" associated with the sitemap, many of which seem to be related to URLs being linked to that are blocked by robots.txt. I was thinking that I could remove them and then keep a close eye on the crawl errors/index status to see if anything changes. Is there any reason why I shouldn't remove these from Webmaster Tools until we get the sitemaps up to par with best practices?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edmundsseo0 -
Homepage 302 redirect - Which option makes most sense?
Edit: Here's a simplified version of this issue and how I have fixed it thus far. On AmbitionSnowskates.com, there is a video section. There is no content on this page, it 302 redirects to the newest video. If you access ambitionsnowskates.com/video/, you are redirected to ambitionsnowskates.com/video/safari-time/. The original post (OP) was about a site with recurring events. There is a cycle between to which subpage the homepage should redirect. For this reason, I was wondering if I should redirect mysite.com to mysite.com/active-subpage/ or the other way around (and have the content directly on the homepage). I was also wondering how this will affect the result in SERPs. It turns out Google shows the title and description of the destination page, but shows the URL of the original URL (the homepage). Knowing this, I can tailor my meta descriptions to be about both the company and the current event; a mix of the two means I won't have to switch or duplicate meta descriptions between active events. I do appreciate the real solution though: in my opinion there should be unique content on the homepage with according CTA. I'm trying to push this as the best fix, with redirections being an alternative, but albeit more complex, solution. Again sorry for being so unclear. I wish I had had an example from the beginning. 🙂 I'm leaving this opened in case someone wants to chime in. Ben Hey guys, I need a hand on this one 🙂 We have a website with 3 events and we want the homepage to show the upcoming event. Event 1 is in February Event 2 is in April Event 3 is in June These events are recurrent year after year. Currently the homepage shows the content of event 1 at the root level (site.com/) . The other events have a unique URL (site.com/event-2, site.com/event-3). Later in the year, after event 1 is over, we change the homepage content to event 2 and move event 1 to its own URL. In other words... Current structure Today: Event 1: site.com/ Event 2: site.com/event-2 Event 3: site.com/event-3 In March: Event 1: site.com/event-1 Event 2: site.com/ Event 3: site.com/event-3 And so on. I want to make sure each event has its own URL and is properly indexed. Option A I can redirect the homepage to the right event: site.com -> 302 -> site.com/event-1. If that's the way to go, what will be the SEO impact, i.e. what content will show up in SERPs? The destination page's content/meta description and title? Option B What I could also do is keep the current structure (content moved to the root), but redirect temporarily the event's unique URL to the homepage: Today: Event 1: site.com/ Event 1: site.com/event-1 -> 302 -> site.com/ Event 2: site.com/event-2 Event 3: site.com/event-3 In March: Event 1: site.com/event-1 Event 2: site.com/ Event 2: site.com/event-2 -> 302 -> site.com/ Event 3: site.com/event-3 And so on. Again, if that's the way to go, how will this impact SERPs, which title and description will I see for the homepage and individual events? If you have other options, I'm all ears! Thanks a lot! (I mean it) -Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BenoitQuimper0 -
301 redirects.
Hi everyone, I am having some issues with an a few dynamic URLs that are not redirecting; Example: http://www.example.com/shop-online?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_images.tpl&product_id=69164&category_id=303 I first tried to carry out a standard 301 which looked like this; Redirect 301 /longurlwith&category_id=303 http://www.example.com/new-url Which didn't work. After a little bit of research I added the following into the htaccess file; RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]RewriteRule ^/shop-online$(.*)$ http://www.example.com/shop-online$ [NE,L,R=301] Which caused the website to error 500 (Not cool). So now I am stumped. Any help would be really appreciated as I'm sure it's an easy fix but I can't quite my finger on it. Thanks in advance :).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AduroLabs0 -
Frequent FAQs vs duplicate content
It would be helpful for our visitors if we were to include an expandable list of FAQs on most pages. Each section would have its own list of FAQs specific to that section, but all the pages in that section would have the same text. It occurred to me that Google might view this as a duplicate content issue. Each page _does _have a lot of unique text, but underneath we would have lots of of text repeated throughout the site. Should I be concerned? I guess I could always load these by AJAX after page load if might penalize us.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress0 -
Setting up of 301 redirects
Good morning all, As part of the analysis of our website, we have realised that we are diluting our keyword strength in a particular area by having multiple zones all targeting the same keyword. We have decided to combine these zones into one, and set up 301 redirects so that the remaining zone gets the benefit of the other zones' link juice. When setting up a 301 redirect from zone "X" to zone "Y" say, do I need to keep all of the content in zone X, or should I remove all content before the redirect is set up? Does zone Y still get the benefit of zone X's link juice if the content is removed? Many thanks Guy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0