301 vs 302 redirect
-
Hello Mozers,
I have a website which offers subscriptions on a monthly basis, when one profile expires the link of the profile gets a 301 redirect to the main category, just that if the member chooses to come back after a while he can reactivate the profile and the link will work again and the 301 will disappear,
Should I be doing 302 redirect, as from this point of view it's only a temporarily redirect ?
Thanks in advance
-
I would use a 301.
Reason #1 - Some of those profiles are going to have external links, as Robert stated in his reply.
Reason #2 - A 302 will not remove the URL from the index like a 301 will. Over time you could end up with many more temporary redirects than actual pages, which may look pretty bad. I prefer not to bloat the index with URLs like that.
In the event that someone comes back you can remove the 301 redirect with no ill-effect. If it has been in place for a long time (e.g. a year or more) the profile page may not get its pagerank back from those older links, which would be fine.
Please also keep in mind that Google can choose to treat a 301 like a 404 if the content doesn't match up. This could easily happen with the situation you mention above. However, I don't really think there is any other option other than doing the 302. I'd rather let it be treated as a 404 than a 302 if we're talking about user-generated pages here because they can get out of hand and bloat the index over time.
eCommerce sites that have products coming and going all the time have similar issues. Imagine if every product a store ever sold stayed indexed for years after the product was no longer available. Even if users are redirected I don't think this is an ideal situation.
-
Hello Yiannis,
Thanks for the response, I think this is the right way, as the profiles are erased after 6 month of inactivity ... never thought of it this way
-
Hello Chris, sorry for the lack of details, so the link caries value on each profile, there are inbound links coming to each profile from our social profiles from shares tweets pins and so on, so each profile carries a link weight but the way we structure the website : thewebsite/city/profile-name , and when the subscription expires it redirects from /city/profile-name to /city, so all the link juice will be carried to the city in question, as for the frequency it depends, we have profile being reactivated after 1 week or after 2-3 month ...
-
Ionut, what specifically does the link go to and from originally and how often do members come back?
-
Hello Ionut,
Since they are subscription profiles (and thus there isnt a link value concern) a 302 might be a better option at start.
The way I would do it is set a rule of permanent user expiration and say once someone does not renew for lets say 6 months or 1 year then I make a permanent 301, until then I leave it as a 302. The length of the month may vary but that's something your analytics will tell you.
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
-
Best process for expired webinars advertised as events 301, 404
Looking for input please on best process from an SEO point of view: We hold a webinar We promote webinar in the website (wordpress) as an event When the webinar finishes we un-publish the event and create a resource page for the recorded webinar and copy the content of the original event post I'm seeing 404's due to the webinar event pages being unpublished. Should I be 301'ing the events to the resource page or keep both? or some other proposal? Many thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | w4rdy1 -
"Heading 1" vs. "Title" Style for SEO
In Word, you can specify "Heading 1" text which Google presumably treats the same as an HTML tag. Is there any benefit in using the "Title" style? Is it the equivalent of a web page's title?
On-Page Optimization | | BlueLinkERP0 -
One Page Website vs. Multipage Site, if you want to target one specific Keyword only.
Hello! suppose I want to start a website about, let's say spray adhesives. My aim is to rank on the first page for the keyword "spray adhesive". I don't care about my ranking on more specific keywords like "Tesa spray adhesive" or "3M spray adhesive". My ranking for more general keywords like "glue" is unimportant, too. So I thought about creating a single-page website, that writes about spray adhesives, the pros & cons of every manufacturer, and shows the best discounts for spray adhesives. Each section can be accessed through a top-navigation, that links via anchors to the individual sections. The page will be updated every day On the other hand, i could create a blog and write an article for every specific spray adhesive. So I would have a home page that lists the latest articles for every product, with titles like "3M spray adhesive CreativeMount", "3M spray adhesive SprayMount", "Tesa Spray adhesive" ... I will write one article every day What do you think would be the better strategy? Is there a risk to create competing articles for the keyword "spray adhesive" and thus rank lower if I go with the blog strategy? On the other hand, does google rate singe-page websites lower, because google thinks those websites are less valuable than websites with many pages for the same topic? Thank you ver much for you help in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | MGMT0 -
Should we consider redirecting a high ranking subdomain page to our homepage?
My site bluecotton.com sells custom printed t-shirts. Our DA is 46. Our homepage is PA 55. The design studio is where users create their designs. Over the years the design studio has received a lot of fan fair including links from gizmodo and adobe. When I rank against our biggest competitors customink, ooshirts, uberprints.com I find that our domain as a whole doesn't look all that great. However, when I look at the history of our subdomain I see that we are more trusted and credible than all of our competitors. We have 10k links pointing to the design studio. Here is my question. What if I did 301 redirect of bluecotton.com/studio.html to bluecotton.com? Then I created a new url for the DS. This would not cause users any problems. In fact for many they would get more context around what we are trying to do and what we offer. Is this crazy? I never find results in google for the design studio. It always shows our home. That is pretty much what happens to all of our competitors on the higher traffic terms that are driving real sales. So why do i ask? If my subdomain is more valuable becuase of the design studio links then I wonder if I redirected it to the homepage if it would supercharge my homepage and propel is forward in the serps. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | bradwayland0 -
Redoing a site - 404 redirect or 301 redirect
I'm redoing a website, should i 404 the old pages, or 301 redirect to the main page? what is better? (around 100 pages)
On-Page Optimization | | mkmedia0 -
301 redirects / clean urls (2)
hello again! 1st i want to thank robert, istvan and everyone else for the great answers to my last question. i guess i should have been a bit more specific with the questionas i am still a bit unclear about a couple of things. i forgot to mention that we actually moved the site several months back and redirected all the "category" pages, but, i wasnt aware that the "product" pages were never redirecte! so my next questions are: at this point is it even worth redirecting those old product pages? if so, should we use the IP address as shown below or the domain as shown below ...i am guessing at the IP address. http://72.3.181.97/catalog/CanineCushionDogCouchBeds.aspx
On-Page Optimization | | k9byron
http://www.k9electronics.com/catalog/CanineCushionDogCouchBeds.aspx also, our old site was never deleted from the server. our ranking / sales dropped off by about 50% when the new site went live so im guessing this can be directly contributed to the products not being redirected / duplicate content from the 2 sites? im also guessing i need to find a new developer ..can i get a vote on that? 😉 <colgroup><col width="856"></colgroup>
| http://72.3.181.97/catalog/CanineCushionDogCouchBeds.aspx |0 -
External vs inline for CSS menu
Which is better for search engines: external or inline menus? And which language: CSS, Javascript, or both?
On-Page Optimization | | teatable0 -
Is 302 Redirect a bad thing in SEO terms?
I am getting a lot of "302 (Temporary Redirects) = True" on many of my product URL's. What does it mean? Is it a bad thing to get these redirects? And how to fix them? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | SEOish0