302 a Homepage?
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I am working with a site that wants to temporarily show a promotional landing page instead of their homepage. Theoretically you could do a 302, but what are the SEO implications of doing such a thing? I would appreciate any first hand experience or feedback on the idea. Ultimately it will not be my decision, but I do have influence.
As a side note, there homepage is a mess (visually displeasing) and they really need a new website. This is one of the reasons that they are leaning this way.
Thanks in advance for the feedback.
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I have a similar situation. I've run an A/B test that indicates that the existing home page (let's call this A) doesn't convert as well as a deeper page (call it B), even for visitors who have seen no other pages on the site.
Until the new home page (A) is ready, I want to take advantage of the immediate gains available by redirecting traffic, in the short term, to B.
I'm confident that 302 is the "correct" way of doing this, since the redirect is temporary, but I'm spooked about how Google will treat this.
Matt, both A and B are already indexed, and both will remain "live" after the permanent fix is in place. Would you still have concerns about a 302?
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I don't have a lot of experience using 302 redirects as usually a 301 was the best way to go with. But in this case I'd say that the 302 is indeed a bit too much for what you want to do. I would go with the suggestion above as well and temporarily replace the homepage just with the new landing page that you'd like to set up to make sure people will get that one.
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Never, ever use a 302. People can disagree with me, but I have seen issues with how Google treats the 302s. If you read the technical specifications on what a 302 is for, your example is a good use case. The reality of how Google treats the URL is that you end up with 2 URLs indexed and then the new URL will stay indexed when you remove the 302. It just ends up as a big mess.
Why not just show the new landing page design on the home page show a 200? Just switch out the code for the page temporarily? Google will just see the new info on the page, and it may help the old page if it was such a mess. Save the old code and you can always switch it back.
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