Shall I use a 301 or 302 redirect when people leave the company?
-
Hello,
At my company, we have instances where client-facing people leave the company and so we need to remove their profile page from the website. As opposed to people receiving a 404 when they search for them, I thought it would be best to divert visitors to a generic landing page to explain that the person they are looking for has left the company with details on how to get in touch.
I'm tempted to use a 302 redirect so the person they are searching for stays in the search results longer. But longer-term, will this cause any harm? Should it be eventually be turned into a 301 redirect? Or should I just use a 301 in the first instance.
Thanks in advance,
Stu
-
Many thanks both.
Stu
-
Hi,
In my opinion you should use 301 redirect at first instance to pass all link value. Unlike the 301 redirect, the 302 redirect is a “temporary move” of content. This redirect lets the search engine know that any URL value should remain with the old page.
In your case there is no use of it if person left the company.
Thanks
-
Hi Stu,
I like your idea for directing people to a page after people have left.
If they've got any links directed at their profile page you won't get any of that link value with a 302 redirect, and a 302 is a temporary redirect, whereas if someone leaves it's a permanent change I'd think.
I'd recommend 301 as this is a permanent redirect and you'll ensure you don't lose any link value.
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
-
Several 301 Redirects to Same Page
Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,0 -
Does this require site-wide 301 redirects?
I have an old site that we are re-building, and also moving form Yahoo Stores to Big Commerce. yahoo uses site.com/page.html and BC uses site.com/page. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the old .html format? some of the pages on the old site have no links to them from external sites. Do they even need re-directs, or should I just let Google find the new page equivalents when they crawl the new version of the site? While some of the old pages (primarily product pages) have OK urls, others have obscure product numbers as the URL. Obviously the latter need re-directing to a more relevant page, but what about situations like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grabapple
_/accessory-product.html _ > product-accessory
In this example, the existing URL is fine, except for the .html extention. If I just used the old URL, would having a mix of /sample.html and /sample pages hurt me? Thanks in advance for your help and input! Dave0 -
Effect Of Restoring Old Website After Implementing 301 Redirects
After redesigning my old Drupal website and launching a new "improved" Wordpress version the new version is performing badly. Ranking is poor and conversions don't occur. I realize that my new design is bad (no call to action, poor structure, text heavy). New business inquiries have ceased. The site contains 450 pages. After spending $25,000 and a year of my life I see the new version is not an improvement! What would be the effect of reinstating the old version of the site and doing 301 redirects back to it? Would the old rankings be restored? I need to decide whether I should revert or focus on fixing flaws in the improved design. Any thoughts?? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Redirect aspx files to a different path structure on a different domain using a different server-side language?
Without getting into the debate/discussion about which server-side language should or should not be used, I am faced with the reality of moving an old ASP.NET site to a Coldfusion one with a different domain and different folder structure. Example: www.thissite.com/animals/lion.aspx --> www.thatsite.com/animals/africa/lion.cfm What is the best way to redirect individual .aspx pages to their .cfm counterparts keeping in mind that, in many cases, the folder paths will be different? If it would mean less work, I am hoping this can be done at the server level (IIS 6) rather than modifying the code on each now-defunct page. And on a related note, how long should any redirects be kept in place? My apologies if this has been answered in this forum in the past, but I did do a lot of searching first (both here and elsewhere) before posting this query.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hamackey0 -
301 redirect rule
Hi there, I have a website that has hundreds of links with a "question mark" at the end of URLs. For example: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQandil
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory?
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/? I'm want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess file but don't know what exactly to add. Ideally I want the URLs above to be: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/ Any help is most appreciated. Thanks
Issa0 -
Can I make 301 redirects on a Windows server (without access to IIS)?
Hey everyone, I've been trying to figure out a way to set up some 301 redirects to handle the broken links left behind after a site restructuring, but I can only ever find information on 2 methods that I can't use (as far as I can tell). The first method is to do some stuff with an htaccess file, but that looks like it only works on Linux-based servers. The method described for Windows servers is generally to install this IIS rewrite/redirect module and run that, but I don't think our web hosting company allows users to log directly into the server, so I wouldn't be able to use the IIS thing. Is there any other way to get a 301 redirect set up? And is this uncommon for a web hosting company to do, or do you all just run your sites on Linux-based servers or your own Windows machines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrianAlpert780 -
301 redirect on Windows IIS. HELP!
Hi My six-year-old domain has always existed in four forms: http://www**.**mydomain.com/index.html http://mydomain.com/index.html http://mydomain.com/ http://www.mydomain.com My webmaster claims it’s “impossible” to do a 301 redirect from the first three to the fourth. I need simple instructions to guide him. The site’s hosted on Windows running IIS Here’s his rationale: These are all the same page, so they can’t redirect to themselves. Index.html is the default page that loads automatically if you don’t specify a page. If I put a redirect into index.html it would just run an infinite redirect loop. As you can see from the IIS set up, both www.mydomain and mydomain.com point to the same location ( VIEW IMAGE HERE ) _Both of these use index.html as the default document ( VIEW IMAGE 2 HERE ) _
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeepster0 -
301 or 302 Redirects to Mobile Site
When it's detected that a mobile device is accessing the site it has the ability to redirect from www.example.com to m.example.com. Does it make more sense to employ a 301 or 302 redirect here? Google says a 301 but does not explain why (although usually I stick to "when in doubt, 301") . It seems like a 302 would prevent passing link juice to the mobile site and having mobile-optimized results also showing up in Google's index. What is the preference here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTGT0
