301 vs 302
-
Hello everyone!
I'm working with a site right now that is currently formatted as subdomain.domain.net. The old version of the site was formatted as domain.net, with domain.com and several other variants redirecting to the current format, subdomain.domain.net.
All of these redirects are 302, and I'm wondering if I should have all these changed to 301. Many of our old backlinks go to the old format of domain.net and i know the juice isn't being passed through, but i was wondering if there is any reason why you may want a 302 over a 301 in this case?
Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks!
-
Hi Paul,
What Bernadette says has a lot of truth.
Even, there's been some recently changes in 3xx redirection rules. And a great professional (Cyrus Shepard) wrote a nice piece of text about that in the Moz Blog.Check it out! 301 Redirects Rules Change: What You Need to Know for SEO
In my opinion, historically 301 are better than 302, if you can set 301, do it.
Best Luck.
GR. -
Paul, that's a good question. Whenever you use a 302 redirect, that's actually a "temporary" redirect, and Google deals with those redirects differently than they do 301 Permanent Redirects.
302 Temporary Redirects should really only be used in cases when you're temporarily redirecting a URL to another one--and you then plan on un-redirecting it back. So, if a site is down for the weekend, you might 302 redirect certain pages elsewhere and then unredirect them.
If you're moving your site to another location, you're permanently moving it. So, you'd use a 301 redirect. Google typically passes the all or most of the "link juice" from one URL to another through the 301 redirect. So, you'll want to use a 301 redirect when you move to a new location.
For more details, see Google's help page here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en
And if you're moving from one domain to another, then you'll want to learn about the Google Change of Address Tool: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
To answer your question, though, most likely you'll want to use a 301. There aren't really any reasons why you'd not want to use a 301 redirect.
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 redirecting a previously abused URL
A client previously had their most important landing page at domain.com/example.htm They carried out the sort of link building that was commonplace a few years back (exact match anchors, paid blog links etc) targeting this URL, but they also got a bunch of legitimate decent quality links here. I believe they may have had a number of issues when link quality algo updates were rolled out, so rather than try and get links removed and go through the disavow process they instead decided to abandon this URL, let it 404 and start afresh at domain.com/example.html - updating all internal navigation, XML sitemaps etc. So fast forward to today. What is the best practice for this URL these days do we think? Is it now possible to 301 domain.com/example.htm > domain.com/example.html and recover whatever value may be left here? The argument for not doing so may be that you could pass over the negative metrics associated with the old URL, but would this not be handled by the real-time penguin update and the poor links just devalued rather than actually harming? And could this just be tested - i.e. add in the 301, monitor the impact and if things don't go the way we'd want then just remove the 301 again? Would be keen to get a few opinions on this. TIA
Technical SEO | | Salience_Search_Marketing0 -
Increase 404 errors or 301 redirects?
Hi all, I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time. I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site. I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take. Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?
Technical SEO | | Oxfordcomma0 -
What to do with 302 redirects being indexed
Hi there, Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor. For example: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/ In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL; en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/ (there is no content here, and never has been). This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links. Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting. Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable. But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index? Is the canonical tag the best way? I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | etruvian0 -
Is there a benefit to Microdata vs. RDFa Lite?
Is there any community consensus about whether Microdata or RDFa Lite is the superior rich-snippet format? I work as a design/front-end-developer and in terms of pure coding, RDFa Lite seems the superior method. It looks to be more flexible and more extensible. The W3C spec is also more mature—it's a W3C Recommendation where Microdata is only a W3C Working Draft—so it's more likely to reach full standardization sooner. Also, because it's a Recommendation it's less likely to change. However, I hear Google "strongly recommends" the use of Microdata. Do they not support RDFa/RDFa Lite? There doesn't seem to be a great deal of discussion on this anywhere so I'm tempted to think it's sort of irrelevant. I am aware that Schema.org is, supposedly, now supporting RDFa Lite.
Technical SEO | | kongregate0 -
404 page for webshop vs 302 redirect
Hi everybody Im the owner of a webshop and we have implemented that products that are not instock are disabled from the shop. My problem is that i have a lot of 404 pages, that right now get redirected to the front page, when the item are not instock. This is because it would hurt the conversion rate if they got a standard 404 page. Customers dont know what a 404 and would click back and choose another competitor. Its really hard to find out what are the best solution and what are not a downrank at google. This has been running like this for 2 years and cant see any negative in the solution regarding seo and so on, What are your thoughts? Christian Hansen Denmark
Technical SEO | | noerdar0 -
When is it safe to remove 301 redirects?
I have created over 500 301 redirects in my .htaccess file, some of them are more than 2 years old now. Should I delete them? I don't like seeing the "notices" number in crawl diagnostics so high 😞
Technical SEO | | danielshaw0 -
Purchasing a site for a 301 Re-direct
Hi Mozzers, I have a question regarding a tactic I'm considering for a client. My client has a web hosting company and is ranking well for his keywords and in position 3 for his main term. There is a site available on flippa that is a keyword rich domain and has a decent link portfolio and domain authority and the price is attractive. I'm considering buying it to 301 it to his domain but I've never done this tactic before. Is this grey/black hat? Has anyone done this before and to what extent did it work? Thanks Bush
Technical SEO | | Bush_JSM0 -
How should 301 redirects affect Page Authority?
We recently setting up 301 redirects from one of our sites so that the site redirects from the www version to the non-www version for all pages. We want to quantify what we expect to see as results. From what the experts say, we'd expect that the Page Authority of the canonical versio (non-www) will be higher than either of the two separate ones were previously. For instance, if this page - www.website.com/information/ - had a PA of 57 and this one - website.com/information/ - had a PA of 53, some time after the 301 redirects from www to non-www have been put into place, we should see the non-www version of that page move up to some PA about 57. It our thinking correct? How long does it normally take to see a PA update take place in a scenario like this? Thanks, Richard
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0