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?
-
This is a friend's tool that has some more options.
http://incredibill.me/htaccess-rewrite-wizard -
We will remove a vertical/division from our current site and migrate the URLs (category and product-specific pages) to new URLs under a new domain. Let me know your thoughts Max!
By the way, thanks for sharing the redirect generator tool.
-
Thanks esiow2013 & others for discussing on 301 redirect, I also had same issue.
-
That's also a useful tool Ash, although it won't deal with URLs that that have parameters in such as question marks.
-
I have found that a 301 takes some time to take effect in the index, so I don't bother with a 302 first, There are many redirect tools on the web and I like this one: http://www.rapidtables.com/web/tools/redirect-generator.htm
-
What are you actually doing, redesigning a site and URLs have changed?
Although regardless, the process is normally the same. As soon as you have launched your new site, made live your new page or whatever is you are redirecting, set the redirects at the same time. There is no reason to delay them and again I really wouldn't bother with doing the redirects as 302's to start with. Just set the 301's, then check them all after, then double check. Even if some are incorrect after implementing, its no biggie. Simply edit it again so its correct .
The best thing to do is prepare all your redirects before I hand. I like to get organised and use a spread sheet with two columns, old URLs in one column, new URLs in the 2nd column. This way you can easily map them out.
Also to speed up the process of actually coding the redirects, I use this tool, it saves a huge amount of time: HtAccess 301 Redirect Generator Tool .
-
Thanks Max! Your answers are a big help. Last question, do I need to 301 redirect the old to new URLs within the day we will launch the new site after removing the old site? or should we prepare 302 redirects and check each URL that are still live(will be removed in site launch) if they land on the appropriate and new URLs and run 301 redirections after?
-
Like you mentioned, the reasoning behind doing 302 redirects initially is in case the redirect has been set incorrectly, giving you time to check them before Google re-crawls and updates the index. As 302 redirects are temporary, after setting the redirect the old page will usually stay in Google's index indefinitely.
However I do many 301 redirects every week and I have never taken this approach; I simply set the 301 redirect, then check everything is correct straight after. If you have hundreds of redirects to do you can check them more efficiently using the Screaming Frog web crawler. You can import your list of pages that should have been redirected in a txt file, then Screaming frog will crawl them telling you what response code they are sending and where they are redirecting too.
Even if you set an incorrect 301 redirect, it can takes weeks to months before Google updates the index, so you shouldn't really need to worry about sending the 'juice' to the incorrect page; although I suppose it depends on how long until you check if you have done those redirects correctly!
There could also be adverse issues. Say you were doing a site migration and you 302 redirected every URL on your site to other URLs, I don't know how Google would react to that, but it could be rather bad!
As the saying goes 'Measure Twice, Cut Once'!
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
-
Do href lang tags need to be implemented at blogpost level?
Hey guys, Our site targets multiple territories. We use subfolders and hreflang tags on the site (built in WordPress) at a page level. We've added our hreflang tags manually in the section of each page. We're just re-doing the blog and we want to know if we need to add these tags to each individual blog post and if we do, how we would do it? Our developers have put them in at blog landing page level and told us that this will be fine. E.g.: /de/blog/ /gb/blog/ /uc/blog/ They have a slight tendency to push back on things though, and we just want to be sure we're doing this right. Hreflang tags are sooooo complicated so hoping you fine people can shed some light on the issue. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Twetman0 -
301 v/s 302 Redirection on Homepage (Multilingual)
Hello, Our website: http://www.luxresorts.com currently has a default 302 redirection to http://www.luxresorts.com/en. We would like to do a 301 redirection instead of a 302 to http://www.luxresorts.com. Our concern is that the site is multilingual and we wonder what effect would the 301 redirection have on search engine crawlers and how would this appear on SERP. When a search is done on Google.com, the English version of our website appears and when on Google.FR, the French version appears. Would the 301 redirection change the way our website appear on Google? Grateful if you could help us out in understanding the pros and cons/best practices for our concern. Thanks in advance. Tej Luchmun.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
301 redirect subdirectory to new domain
I'm planning on using 301 redirects to spin out a subdirectory of my current website to be its own separate domain. For instance, I currently have a website www.website.com and my writers write tech news at www.website.com/news. Now I want to 301 redirect www.website.com/news to www.technews.com. Will this have any negative impact on SEO? What are some steps that I can take to minimize these impacts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Bishop1 -
For how long does Google honor a 302 redirect?
Greetings! I would love some recent experiences to support our experience which is +/- 1 year old on this question. Based on our experiences around a year ago, I believe that Google will only honor a 302 temporary redirect for a relatively short period - perhaps up to a month - and then it will begin treating the redirect as a 301 redirect and will remove the old page from the index. Have others seen this? Is there an update on what the max "safe" period to have a 302 in place could be? We have a domain that is soon to experience about 3 months of "downtime" with no content on it, but the content will be back after that time. Ideally we would 302 redirect the pages elsewhere just for that downtime period. However, I don't want to do a 302 redirect if there is a risk that the pages will lose all of their accumulated authority and indexing. Basically, is there any safe way to just put the domain on ice for a few months? Please share recent experience only. Thanks for your insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | g-s-m0 -
How should we 301 redirecting ecommerce microsite to our larger ecommmerce site? Should we?
We have several microsites (by microsite I mean sites that are basically top-level departments of our main ecommerce site. We continue to run these, without much support, and they do generate a few sales but we simply don't have the resources to grow them or manage them effectively. We have "kicked around" the idea of 301 redirecting them to our main ecommerce site with the idea that any additional SEO value would be greater than the few sales they currently generate. All products that are on our microsites can be found on our main ecommerce site, thus we can redirect products on our microsites to the exact product on our main site. How would you treat these sites? Would you 301 redirect them? If so, how would you do it? What would be some considerations if we decide to 301 redirect? Microsite example: http://www.drinkingstuff.com/ Main site: http://www.prankplace.com/ I would greatly appreciate any tidbits the community could provide us on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Istoresinc0 -
Effect of 301 redirect to a relative url to homepage?
One of our new clients recently encountered a site-wide ranking drop for many keywords and I'm pretty confident regarding their link profile as to being 98% legit. Background: 1. Client full site is https, and all http pages are 301 redirected to their https counterpart 2. Client has ~50 links partners (all legitimate sites + schools etc) links to client with urls such as www.example.com/portal/123.aspx that redirects to www.example.com. 3. Client homepage 301 redirects from www.example.com to www.example.com/default.aspx and then 301 redirects to the relative url "/Home.aspx". 4. Client launched some testing with Google website optimizer tool. ~1-2 months ago. Symptoms: 1. Rankings dropped for basically many/all 30-40+ keywords by ~15 positions 2. Seomoz reports close to a double of existing pages + (600+) duplicate content in the same date range. Webmasters only report 80 duplicate titles though. 3. Domain authority by seomoz reduced a bit + backlinks recorded by seomoz to the website nearly halved in the past 2 months. I'm not sure if I narrowed this towards the right direction, and it isn't clear when the relative url 301 redirect was implemented: 1. The 301 redirect to the relative page (www.example.com/default.aspx to "/home.aspx") is accounting for the loss of links recorded by seomoz. 2. The ~50 links the client currently use (www.example.com/portal.123.aspx 301 redirecting to www.example.com, also relative) as a tracking tool is being considered 301 redirect abuse. 3. Maybe something went wrong with the usage of google optimizer tool for SEO purposes? Visitor traffic to each of the tested pages looked fine. I would greatly appreciate any advice/insights on what I might be missing in terms of direction / factors. Thanks! Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sixspokemedia0 -
Should 301 Redirects be used only in cross domains or also internally?
In the following video with Cutts: http://youtu.be/r1lVPrYoBkA he explains a bit more about 301 redirects but he only talks about cross sites. What about redirecting internally from a non-existing product in a store to a new similar existing product?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Probelms w/ 301 Redirects
I am trying to 301 redirect my old site to the new site (under the same domain. Most of the 404 urls are 301 redirects from 404 pages but they are still able to redirect. I need help understanding why I cannot redirect half of my list. <colgroup><col width="636"> <col width="342"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia
| OLD URL | 301 To: | Status |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/groups.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/groups.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/entertainment/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/services.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/all_inclusive.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/visor.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/los-picapiedra/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/outside-us-telephone-listing.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/restaurantes/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/reuniones-eventos/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/grupos.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/spa/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/terms-condition.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/gallery/beach.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/gallery/dining.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/gastronomy.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/gallery/pools.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/lowest-rate.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/services/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/services.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/services/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/terms-condition.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/piscinas.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/playa.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/restaurantes.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/family-facilities-amenities.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/family-facilities-amenities.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/accommodations/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/habitaciones.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/dining/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/entertainment/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/events/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/flintstones/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/visor.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/beach.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/dining.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/pools.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/royal/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicio-real.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/sitemap.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/spa/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html |
| gastronomia.html0