Explaining 301 redirects instead of 302
-
I am trying to explain in layman's terms to a client why using 302 for their redirects (which they have done themselves) is not right. There view is they do not seem to listen or believe what is being said to them and do not want to do permanent damage to the old domain so are using 302 redirects. I have explained over and over 301 is needed but I do not seem to be good at communicating this. Can someone give me a good example or description I can use to get my point across?
-
Keri, the problem with this analogy is that it reinforces the concept of a fallback or safety net.
Who wouldn't feel better going off to college knowing that if by some chance it didn't work out, you'd still have Mom & Dad keeping your nice warm bed and comfy room waiting for you.
That's exactly the unfortunate attitude FreshFire is up against - the site owners think it's more valuable to keep that fallback in place than to fully commit to the new site.
Which is why I suggested that maybe there's more to the issue than just "not getting it".
Paul
-
If you really think there isn't an underlying problem & he just needs a more comprehensible explanation, the best luck I've had explaining this to clients is by getting away from anything technical and from temporary/permanent and even talking about redirects at all.
I explain to them how they are actually wasting resources in competition with themselves, allowing others to gain success at their expense. (You're not gonna beat 'em with logic - gotta hit 'em in the pocketbook)
So... goes something like...
Google decides how much a site is worth. The more the site is worth, the higher it shows in the results.
Google currently thinks you have two sites for the same topic, so they are effectively competing against each other to try to gain points from Google.
Let's say your current site has a value of 8, and your old site has a value of 5.
But your biggest competitor's site has a value of 9.
So overall even though you have more "Google Value", you've split it over 2 sites so neither one of them alone has the power to beat the single site that has a score of 9.
So you're losing business opportunities to your competitor because Google places him above both of your other sites.
But if you use the technical tools available (called 301 redirecting) you can tell Google to combine the values of your 2 sites to determine the new value. You won't get to just add the two totals together (Google isn't quite that generous) but your combined site will get about 8+3 for a total of 11.
So now, once the changes have worked their way through the system, your competitor (9) is now losing opportunities to you (11) and must play catch up. And you accomplished that not with a lot of very expensive new work, but by using the existing tools that were designed just for this purpose.
Do you want to sit in the background and compete against yourself, or get out front and compete against (and have a much better chance of winning over) your competitor?
There are lots of analogies that can be created to put this concept into everyday terms, but I find in this case it's better to stick closer to the actual Search Engine paradigm.
Paul
-
When an otherwise smart person seems to obstinantly insist on ignoring good advice, I always look for a hidden or unstated reason that might better explain the actions, rather than just writing it off as "he just doesn't get it".
I suspect you may need to dig deeper to find out what it is he's afraid of that makes him think he needs to avoid "doing permanent damage to the old domain". I strongly suspect there's an underlying issue there. Maybe he doesn't fully agree with the direction of the new site? Doesn't trust its new business model or tools? You may need to do some real digging to figure out why he seems to feel so strongly that he needs to keep his failsafe or fallback position.
Paul
-
- yay! I will try.
You see it's harder to explain than you think!
-
How about a 302 is when you go off to college in another state (you still keep your voter registration, your permanent address, your license plate, etc in your home state), and a 301 is when you are moving for good to another place and you're setting up residency there?
-
Do you think the graphic that Dr. Pete created might help at all?
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes
-
Exactly!!! lol - Any ideas? It's hard to explain to a non pc person....
-
Sanket, the poster of the question understands what link juice is, and why a 301 is needed. He's looking for a way to explain it to his clients to convince them.
-
I know what it means! lol I am trying to think of a way to explain it to someone not into SEO or website i.e. a laymans response! - How to phrase it in simple terms....
-
Link juice means ranking power you can beat your competitor for ranking in Google. If any DoFollow site contains high page rank then you get high link juice from that site, if that site contains more outbound links then you get less linkjuice from that site. For example read this link.
-
They don't understand link juice....
-
Hi,
302 redirect is temporary bases and it does not passes any link juice and inbound links of that page, in most of cases it does not use. 302 you can use when your site is temporary under-construction and your content temporarily moved somewhere else. 302 refers to the HTTP status code so when you open that page and age does not forund you get 404 status code. If you are using 302 redirect then Create a custom error page for 404s which will give visitors that encounter your error page an indication of how to get back on track. Read this link for knowing more about how to use 302 http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/
301 redirect is permanent redirect and pases between 90-99% of link juice and inbound links and page rank. It is best method to implementing redirects on website. 301 redirect is preferable for both you and search engine also.
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
-
Is it worth keeping a decades-old domain that's merely 301 redirecting to the main domain?
Hi fellow Moz SEOs, We have a bigger client who we just did an SEO Site Audit for, and it was discovered that they have several domain names that are simply 301 redirecting to their main domain name. One of their domains in particular is decades old, and the client is asking if there is any value in keeping it (and the others), or simply leaving them as-is. Considering the domain age, does anyone have any recommendations? Much appreciated, Zack Barton
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zack
Barton Interactive
(833) 442.6853 // office
(408) 910.7750 // mobile
https://bartoninteractive.com0 -
301 Question - issue
A while back we had a 'bleed' on one of our sites, which basically meant one of our sites started to leak across pages to another and that site started to rank for the same pages and now we have hundreds of pages ranking for urls that do not exists. It's hard to explain, bare with me. If you were to click on the cached view in Google for the ranked page it would show you the main site, but if you were to click it as usual, then you would be taken to the site but a 404 would show as the intended page was not for that site. We believe we fixed the 'bleed' and have setup 301s for all the affected pages to go to the home page for the site it affected. But these pages have not been removed from Google, which we thought a 301 would do. So we still have hundreds of pages being ranked but are redirected to the home page. Why hasn't these pages been removed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
301 redirect to avoid duplicate content penalty
I have two websites with identical content. Haya and ethnic Both websites have similar products. I would like to get rid of ethniccode I have already started to de-index ethniccode. My question is, Will I get any SEO benefit or Will it be harmful if I 301 direct the below only URL’s https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez -> https://www.hayacreations/collections/salwar-kameez https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez/anarkali-suits - > https://www.hayacreations/collections/anarkali-suits
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
Website can't break into Google Top100 for main keywords, considering 301 Redirect to a new domain
A little background on our case. Our website, ex: http://ourwebsite.com was officially live in December 2015 but it wasn't On-Site optimized and we haven't done any Off-site SEO to it. In April we decided to do a small redesign and we did it an online development server. Unfortunately, the developers didn't disallow crawlers and the website got indexed while we were developing it on the development server. The development version that got indexed in Google was http://dev.web.com/ourwebsite We learned that it got indexed when we migrated the new redesigned website to the initial domain. When we did the migration we decided to add www and now it looks like: http://www.ourwebsite.com Meanwhile, we deleted the development version from the development server and submitted "Remove outdated content" from the development server's Search Console. This was back in early May. It took about 15-20 days for the development version to get de-indexed and around 30 days for the original website (http://www.ourwebsite.com) to get indexed. Since then we have started our SEO campaign with Press Releases, Outreach to bloggers for Guest and Sponsored Posts etc. The website currently has 55 Backlinks from 44 Referring domains (ahrefs: UR25, DR37) moz DA:6 PA:1 with various anchor text. We are tracking our main keywords and our brand keyword in the SERPs and for our brand keyword we are position #10 in Google, but for the rest of the main (money) keywords we are not in the Top 100 results in Google. It is very frustrating to see no movement in the rankings for the past couple of months and our bosses are demanding rankings and traffic. We are currently exploring the option of using another similar domain of ours and doing a complete 301 Redirect from the original http://www.ourwebsite.com to http://www.ournewebsite.com Does this sound like a good option to you? If we do the 301 Redirect, will the link-juice be passed from the backlinks that we already have from the referring domains to the new domain? Or because the site seems "stuck," would it not pass any power to the new domain? Also, please share any other suggestions that we might use to at least break into the Top 100 results in Google? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielGorsky0 -
Should I run 302 first before implementing 301?
I just want to ask if it is necessary to run 302 redirections first before redirecting old to new URLs permanently. I heard that we should run temporary redirects first so we can check after and to avoid passing the link juice but I want to hear thoughts from experts. Do i need to test 302s for old pages that are still live or should we redirect old URLs once these pages already removed from the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow20130 -
Url rewrite & 301 redirects
Hi all I am having some issues rearding url rewrites and 301 redirects with 1 and 1 hosting and am unsure of the best approach. The website is a custom made shopping cart system with categories and products. The current urls for categories are : index.php?l=product_list&c=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands The current urls for products are : index.php?l=product_detail&c=1&p=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands/banner-stand Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vividwebdesign0 -
What if a 301 redirect is removed?
Suppose the following scenarios after a 301 redirects from source URL to targent URL is removed. 1. If source URL raises a 404 error, will target URL retained the link juice previously passed from source URL? 2. If source URL starts to show different content than what is showing on target URL, will the previously passed link juice be credited back to the source URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bull1350