Do my redirects on my homepage need to be 301?
-
Our domain name is something like www.I-am-cool.com but most people just type in iamcool.com After doing some research I found that those are 302 redirects and I think they should be 301. If I am correct do I need to redirect www.iamcool.com and iamcool.com or just one or the other?
-
That is exactly what I was looking for. Thank You.
-
Sorry, Niners, I wasn't clear you were talking about two different spellings of the domain as well as the www and non www versions. I had assumed that was just a typo. Sorry 'bout that.
So... if you own iamcool.com and i-am-cool-com, you essentially have four variations for the domain URL you need to address. The Search Engines consider each of these to be different sites:
- www.i-am-cool-com
- i-am-cool.com
- www.iamcool.com
- iamcool.com
Out of all of these, you're going to pick the one that is your primary site address. This will become what's known as your FQDN - Fully Qualified Domain Name. This will be the URL you use for EVERYTHING you control. All links will use this full version, it's what you'll put on business cards, in bio links on guest posts, everything.
Since you say that the version with the hyphens has been in existence the longest, I would recommend that become your primary. And further, I suspect that the www version of it probably has the most incoming links.
So,,, www.i-am-cool.com will become your primary site address - your FQDN. (Assuming you agree with what's stated above.)
Once that's decided, you now need to 301-redirect each of the other versions directly to that www.i-am-cool.com URL. (For example, you specifically want to avoid a situation where iamcoolcom redirects to www.iamcool,com, which then redirects again to the final www.i-am-cool.com.)
Once you've done the redirects, you'll want to keep a close eye on your Webmaster Tools and Analytics to make sure you're not getting 404s from pages not being caught by the redirects correctly. In addition, you can use the hostnames report in Analytics to make sure that only your FQDN is showing up, indicating all the other versions are redirecting correctly.
Hope that clears things up a little more.
Paul
-
definitely keep it then!
-
Changing it to a 301 makes sense. Do I need to change for both with the www and without? I have never quite figured out if that counts as two different urls or not.
-
The only reason we still use the one with the hyphens is because we have been using the same domain name for over ten years.
-
You definitely need to change the 302 to a 301 redirect, Niners. Typically, you check which version has the most incoming links already (since it's an existing site) and make that the primary address. Then you use the 301 redirect to point the other URL to the primary one.
Even though many people may directly type in the URL without the www, most people who are writing it as a link on a webpage will do it including the www. Having those incoming links avoid needing a redirect is more important than the folks typing in direct (since even 301s don't pass absolutely all the link authority.)
Make sense?
Paul
-
302 redirects do not pass PR so you need to 301 the site instead, if there is PR on that site. if not you can just point that domain at the DNS level and it will resolve.
but i would think the version without the hyphens is more desirable. why isn't that your main domain name? obviously you own both domains. people only use the hyphens when the domain name they want is already taken.
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 there any benefit to changing 303 redirects to 301?
A year ago I moved my marketplace website from http to https. I implemented some design changes at the same time, and saw a huge drop in traffic that we have not recovered from. I've been searching for reasons for the organic traffic decline and have noticed that the redirects from http to https URLs are 303 redirects. There's little information available about 303 redirects but most articles say they don't pass link juice. Is it worth changing them to 301 redirects now? Are there risks in making such a change a year later, and is it likely to have any benefits for rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAdeit0 -
301 redirection help needed!
Hi all, So if we used to have a domain (let's say olddomain.com) and we had a new site created at newdomain.com how do we properly setup redirects page to page. Caveat, the urls have changed so for instance the old page oldomain.com/service is now newdomain.com/our-services on the new site. Do we need to have hosting on the old site? Do we need to setup individual 301s for each page corresponding to the new page? Just looking for the easiest way to do this CORRECTLY. Thanks, Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley3 -
Googlebot being redirected but not users?
Hi, We seem to have a slightly odd issue. We noticed that a number of our location category pages were slipping off 1 page, and onto page 2 in our niche. On inspection, we noticed that our Arizona page had started ranking in place of a number of other location pages - Cali, Idaho, NJ etc. Weirdly, the pages they had replaced were no longer indexed, and would remain so, despite being fetched, tweeted etc. One test was to see when the dropped out pages had been last crawled, or at least cached. When conducting the 'cache:domain.com/category/location' on these pages, we were getting 301 redirected to, you guessed it, the Arizona page. Very odd. However, the dropped out pages were serving 200 OK when run through header checker tools, screaming frog etc. On the face of it, it would seem Googlebot is getting redirected when it is hitting a number of our key location pages, but users are not. Has anyone experienced anything like this? The theming of the pages are quite different in terms of content, meta etc. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers0 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
301 redirect a old site that has been "dead" for a while?
Hi guys, A quick question. I have a client who has an old business website that had some great links (Forbes.com, CocaCola.com, etc). The problem is that he knew nothing about SEO and let the hosting expire. He still owns the domain, but the site is no longer listed in Google. He did no SEO, so I am not worried about being hit by any artificial anchor text penalties, since the links are as natural as it gets. So my questions is, would there be any benefit from 301 redirecting that site to his new business? The new business is in almost exactly the same niche as the old site. I am thinking of 301'ing to a sub-page which will refer to his past venture with the old business, not to the homepage of the new site. Thanks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Canonicalization interact with 301 redirects?
This is a interesting one I think. I have recently taken down some product list pages from our website www.towelsrus.co.uk. These have canonicalisation in place to deal with pages where a query string is generated depending on the search criteria. When I put a 301 redirect in place the target page redirects fine, however webmaster tools then errors with 404 on all canonicalised pages. Is this correct behaviour and how do we get over this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
301 redirect
Hi there, I have some good links pointing to one of my web pages at the moment, however we are just about to launch a new design with new URL structure and I am clear that I need to do a 301 redirect on the URL to the new URL. However, do I keep the old URL live forever? or can I remove it after a while? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?
I have a well established domain that's been hit with some penalties. It hasn't been nuked off the map, just downgraded, especially on short-tail, one word type queries. I'm planning on redirecting this domain to another well established domain. The domains already have a history of lots of interlinking and are very similar from a subject matter standpoint. I feel that the penalized domain has been hit with an "over-optimization" of link anchor text penalty (I'm hoping it's algorithmic, but it could be manual). My question is if anyone has ever heard of a penalty like this being transferred to another domain through a 301 redirect. My hope is that the penalty just puts a cap on how much juice the redirect can pass, rather than transferring the penalty to the other domain itself. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOMG1