301 issue in IE9
-
My development team recently discovered an issue with 301 redirects caching in IE9. They did some research and found the situation was very complicated so their solution was to use 302s and no longer use 301s. As a temporary solution to a few URLs I was okay with this, but we have a site redesign launching in a few months and I am quite worried if we have to do all of our redirects as 302s. Has anyone else had this issue with IE9 and 301s. I could use any advice on how to overcome this issue.
Thanks!
-
Haven't heard of that with IE9, but from an SEO standpoint, 302s everywhere is much more risky than a few 301s mis-firing as 404s. I get why they're concerned, but this is the wrong solution. Is there a way to set up the redirects within the page headers and only returns 302s for IE9, for the short-term. That's not ideal, but it's at least a stop-gap solution. I'm sincerely afraid their short-term "fix" could cause you long-term problems.
-
If they're permanent redirects, they should be done on your server so it shouldn't matter what browser the user is using. You're not doing the redirects with JavaScript, are you?
-
They told me the issue is causing the redirect script to break so redirects don't fire and we just get a 404. I will say I don't fully understand what is going on from a technical perspective. But, I understand that they want to stop using 301s and obviously that is scary to me as an SEO. I want to provide them with some more information or a solution so that they feel comfortable using 301s.
-
I'm not exactly sure what the problem you're having with IE9 is from the description, but all modern browsers are allowed to cache 301 redirects, not just IE9. 301 redirects are permanent redirects. If you set up a URL to 301 redirect to another URL, you should never change that redirect to point to another page. People who have been through the redirect before may cache it and the browser will put them through the redirect next time without hitting your server for the new page (after all, you told the browser it was a permanent redirect).
It looks like in IE9 it may be complicated to clear the 301 from the browser's memory (beyond just clearing the browser cache), so beware! Here's an article I found about that. And here's an article about undoing 301 redirect mistakes.
-
Hmm, this is the first I've heard of this issue since I rarely use IE9. But I found this which may help - http://agsci.psu.edu/it/how-to/topics/web/web-development/plone/internet-explorer-9-permanently-caches-redirects
It is very important that you use 301 redirects instead of 302 redirects if the pages are going to be permanently moved.
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
-
Website indexing issues
My website is being indexed with both https - https with www. and no leader at all. example. https//www.example.com and https//example.com and example.com 3 different versions are being indexed. How would I begin resolving this? Hosting?
Technical SEO | | DigitalRipples0 -
Google serp pagination issue
We are a local real estate company and have landing pages for different communities and cities around our area that display the most recent listings. For example: www.mysite.com/wa/tumwater is our landing page for the city of Tumwater homes for sale. Google has indexed most of our landing pages, but for whatever reason they are displaying either page 2, 3, 4 etc... instead of page 1. Our Roy, WA landing page is another example. www.mysite.com/wa/roy has recently been showing up on page 1 of Google for "Roy WA homes for sale", but now we are much further down and www.mysite.com/wa/roy?start=80 (page 5) is the only page in the serps. (coincidentally we no longer have 5 pages worth of listings for this city, so this link now redirects to www.mysite.com/wa/roy.) We haven't made any major recent changes to the site. Any help would be much appreciated! *You can see what my site is in the attached image... I just don't want this post to show up when someone google's the actual name of the business 🙂 nTTrSMx.jpg C4mhfgh.jpg
Technical SEO | | summithomes0 -
301 redirects delay in picking up
Hi I have been involved in the redesign/development of a website which has up until now had a lot of international traffic. On day of migration I uploaded all the 301 redirects to the website (wordpress) using Simple 301 redirect plugin. I tested a number of them and they appeared to be working. I also submitted the new sitemaps to Search Console. Since migration international traffic - particularly from countries such as india, Phillipines, Sri Lanka etc have significantly dropped off whereas the local traffic and some of the international traffic such as USA has remained fairly consistent. Looking at Analytics and entrances recently it appears as though search results are/were showing a number of pages with 404's (one in particular which received significant traffic and for which I had created a 301 redirection) - I have checked this page using the old url and it re-directs correctly for me and today asked a colleague in India to also check - he is getting the redirection fine. Does Google.in take a significantly longer time to pick these up in search results? Or am I missing something?
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing0 -
Can I remove 301 redirects after some time?
Hello, We have an very large number of 301 redirects on our site and would like to find a way to remove some of them. Is there a time frame after which Google does not need a 301 any more? For example if A is 301 redirected to B, does Google know after a while not to serve A any more, and replaces any requests for A with B? How about any links that go to A? Or: Is the only option to have all links that pointed to A point to B and then the 301 can be removed after some time? Thank you for you you help!
Technical SEO | | Veva0 -
Duplicate Homepage issue
SEOMOZ says my site has two homepages: www.mysite.com www.mysite.com/ When you go to "www.mysite.com/" the URL changes to "www.mysite.com" Why is this happening and what can I do about it?
Technical SEO | | LucasF0 -
Setting up a 301 redirect from expired webpages
Hi Guys, We have recently created a new website for one of our clients and replaced their old website on the same domain. One problem that we are having is that all of the old pages are indexed within Google (1000s) and are just getting sent to our custom 404 page. We are finding that there is an large bounce rate from this and also, I am worried from an SEO point of view that the site could lose rank positioning through the number of crawl errors that Google is getting. Want I want is to set up a 301 redirect from these pages to go to the 'our brands' page. The reason for this is that the majority of the old URLs linked to individual product pages, and one thing to note is that they are all .asp pages. Is there a way of setting up a rule in the htaccess file (or another way) to say that all webpages that end with the suffix of .asp will be 301 redirected to the our brands' page? (there is no .asp pages on the new site as it is all done in php). If so, I would love it if someone could post the code snippet. Thanks in advance guys and if you have any other ideas then be my guest to suggest 🙂 Matt.
Technical SEO | | MatthewBarby0 -
Trailing slash 301 redirect code
Hi, I have code for redirecting trailing slash to non-trailing slash, which works fine: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.yourdomain.co.uk$ [NC]RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] (got code from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html) But I cant find a code for redirecting to the trailing slash version anywhere, and I cant modify the above code myself. Can someone help resolve this issue please, or point me to a resource. Thanks very much James
Technical SEO | | jamesjackson0 -
Joomla 301 redirects
hi i am using joomla sef404 and i have 7000 not found pages in my webmaster google tool page. the trouble is i got rid of a lot of pages and also components so now i am left with loads of not found pages. what i want to try and do is to create 301 redirects so that i do not lose page rank. can anyone please let me know how to do this step by step please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860