301 or 302 or leave at 410
-
I have a client who manages vacation rental properties and those properties get links. If an owner pulls their property off the rental market the current status given is a 410 which I instinctively want turned into a 301. The problem is, often those properties come back online with the same URL so the question is, when a 301 is turned into a 200 - has anyone noticed a significant delay in time for that page to rank?I know technically it should probably be a 410 or maybe a 302 but ... you know ... the link weight.
-
Hi Dave,
301 means that the page has been moved permanently. I suspect the search engines take specific actions upon seeing a 301 for a short period of time.
A 410 - means that the page is gone, and gone forever. And a 404 means that the page is temporarily unavailable.
In your case, I think I'd want to setup a process where for 3-7 days, you return a simple 404. I.e. the page is temporarily unavailable. If during those 3-7 days, the page comes back up - start serving it per normal.
If after 3-7 days, the page is still not up, I'd serve up a custom 410 page that offers alternatives that can be clicked through to if the customer/property owner did not list again. If he ever DOES list again, I'd be sure to 301 to the new page, regardless of time delay.
There may also be some thought to allowing pages to display in a historical sense. I.e. - this is what the page you want looked like - but it's no longer available. Thus preserving some of the traffic, which you might find some use for.
Finally - some possible ideas for "missing pages"
- Present other properties very close to the missing property
- Communicate with your viewer what is happening. i.e. - the listing agent/owner removed the listing - but over XX% of properties delisted come back within 10 days! Please check back - would you like us to email you if this property comes back online? (collect email opportunity!)
- Present a historical page showing what the listing used to look like. (legal issues?)
- Display a 404 page - but provide other interesting information/content. i.e. since you know what the old page was like - you probably can figure out related/highly related content to present in it's stead.
Hope this helps
Kevin -
Followup.
I'm not sure if it's possible, will check tomorrow but if we can keep the page up with a "property no longer available" notice and a canonical to an appropriate category page and put it live if the property is re-added ... what do you think?
Not sure why I didn't think of that out of the gate.
-
For more on 301s, read "301 Redirects: The Horror That Cannot Be Uncached." It's not quite true that they can't be uncached, but it's incredibly difficult to do so. From a UI standpoint, if someone has a cottage they like, and has bookmarked the URL, then one day they visit the URL and get a 301, their browser will cache that 301 for months, even if the URL comes back and starts returning a 200 with content.
-
You probably don't want to be going 200 > 301 > 200 too often. Although it may work and may rank again, once you 301 by definition that's a "permanent" redirect. Especially since the property could then go off again ... 200 > 301 > 200 > 301 > 200 ... and somewhere in there, all is lost.
I would make these 302 links. First, if it's 302 long enough, the goodness will pass through the 302 anyways. I don't know if this is 90 days, 180 days or something really unexpected like 102 days ... but eventually it does pass through (same if you 302 a bad domain to your main domain, the penalties will eventually pass through.)
But a 302 would serve you as a temporary redirect, keep the juice on the referring page (unless it never comes back) and then either long term rank the original URL or pass the juice.
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
-
301 Domain Redirect from old domain with HTTPS
My domain was indexed with HTTPS://WWW. now that we redirected it the certificate has been removed and if you try to visit the old site with https it throws an obvious error that this sites not secure and the 301 does not happen. My question is will googles bot have this issue. Right now the domain has been in redirection status to the new domain for a couple months and the old site is still indexed, while the new one is not ranking well for half its terms. If that is not causing the problem can anyone tell me why would the 301 take such a long time. Ive double and quadruple checked the 301's and all settings to ensure its being redirected properly. Yet it still hasn't fully redirected. Something is wrong and my clients ready to ditch the old domain we worked on for a good amount of time. backgorund:About 30 days ago we found some redirect loops .. well not loop but it was redirecting from old domain to the new domain several times without error. I removed the plugins causing the multi redirects and now we have just one redirect from any page on the old domain to the new https version. Any suggestions? This is really frustrating me and I just can't figure it out. My only answer at this point is wait it out because others have had this issue where it takes up to 2 months to redirect the domain. My only issue is that this is the first domain redirect out of many that have ever taken more than a week or three.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Use 302 redirect when site crashes
My company has switched to a new ecommerce platform that we are not totally familiar with yet. As we've worked with it, we've had a couple situations where both the front and back ends of our site crashed simultaneously (always after installing a third party module). The platform's built-in backup solution hasn't been an option in those situations so we've been coming up with alternatives. We now have a duplicate of the site on our server for such emergencies. The plan is to have pages on the broken site point to the backup site using 302 redirects until the broken site is fixed. Is this correct usage of the 302 redirect? I often see people recommend to never use 302 redirects, but I thought this might be the kind of situation where they'd be appropriate. If so, are there other SEO considerations we should keep in mind? For example, I'm wondering if we should put canonical tags on the temporary site that point to the broken site so the broken site stays in the SE indexes.
Technical SEO | | Kyle_M1 -
301 redirects without .htaccess
I have a client that recently moved from an old ZenCart e-commerce site to Volusion. The domain name did not change. We need to redirect a bunch of the old URLs; however, Volusion's redirect tool does not work for URLS with "?" . The old ZenCart structure is: http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=563 Volusion is a hosted platform and we do not have access to the .htaccess file. Any suggestions on a workaround? Thanks!Nancy <colgroup><col width="960"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | NancyVPS
| |0 -
301 Redirects in subfolders
Hi, we're making our site into a static site but I would like to transfer the Google juice. Most of the links and database exist on subfolders though. Could I simply do 301 redirects on the subfolders and retain the value or does it have to be on the full domain?
Technical SEO | | Therealmattyd0 -
Shutting down a site, where do I 301 it?
I'm working with a few international sites that we are going to collapse into one main site. Our current plan is to 301 the 4 other sites into our main site home page. Is this ok? Is there a better way to do this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Penguin 301 Re-Direct
Hi I already know the answer to this but wanted some backup. A friend of mine has asked me to take a look at his site. He was using an SEO company that saw him get hit hard by Penguin. He did the right thing and started all over with a new domain name. I've just noticed that the old domain name is actually setup to 301 to the new domain. This has to be a bad thing right?
Technical SEO | | brightonseorob0 -
Could a URL change path conflict a 301 redirect?
Hi Mozzers, We create multiple pages for one of my client. Some of them are replacing old pages. I setup 5 of them out of 40. I was able to set them live via the drupal CMS. The new pages were actually published but didn't have any URL but had nodes in directory such as www.example.com/node298. To set them live i changed the url path to one page that already existed( www.example.com/old). In order to setup the replacing page: www.example.com/node298 i added the same name as the old one but in order to avoid URL conflicts with new page(www.example.com/new) I had to change the old page's url path as well such as www.example.com/old2) I know i have to 301 redirect the old to the new obviously but my question is: does a URL path change on the old page www.example.com/old matters in when 301 ing it? will it still transfer all the juice to the new page Visual Process: Main goal: www.example.com/old redirect to www.example.com/new but these two are exactly the same url So modification of URL path: www.example.com/old to www.example.com/old2 to avoid URL conflict Therefore www.example.com/old2 =www.example.com/old (just url change path difference) Question: Because of this url change, will a 301 from www.example.com/old2 to www.example.com/new will still carry all the juice that www.example.com/old carried or not? I hope i didn't make it too confusing. Let me know if it is the case Thanks Mozzers Ty
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Rel=Canonical on a page with 302 redirection existing
Hi SEOMoz! Can I have the rel=canonical tag on a URL page that has a 302 redirection? Does this harm the search engine friendliness of a content page / website? Thanks! Steve
Technical SEO | | sjcbayona-412180