301 vs 302 redirect
-
Hello Mozers,
I have a website which offers subscriptions on a monthly basis, when one profile expires the link of the profile gets a 301 redirect to the main category, just that if the member chooses to come back after a while he can reactivate the profile and the link will work again and the 301 will disappear,
Should I be doing 302 redirect, as from this point of view it's only a temporarily redirect ?
Thanks in advance
-
I would use a 301.
Reason #1 - Some of those profiles are going to have external links, as Robert stated in his reply.
Reason #2 - A 302 will not remove the URL from the index like a 301 will. Over time you could end up with many more temporary redirects than actual pages, which may look pretty bad. I prefer not to bloat the index with URLs like that.
In the event that someone comes back you can remove the 301 redirect with no ill-effect. If it has been in place for a long time (e.g. a year or more) the profile page may not get its pagerank back from those older links, which would be fine.
Please also keep in mind that Google can choose to treat a 301 like a 404 if the content doesn't match up. This could easily happen with the situation you mention above. However, I don't really think there is any other option other than doing the 302. I'd rather let it be treated as a 404 than a 302 if we're talking about user-generated pages here because they can get out of hand and bloat the index over time.
eCommerce sites that have products coming and going all the time have similar issues. Imagine if every product a store ever sold stayed indexed for years after the product was no longer available. Even if users are redirected I don't think this is an ideal situation.
-
Hello Yiannis,
Thanks for the response, I think this is the right way, as the profiles are erased after 6 month of inactivity ... never thought of it this way
-
Hello Chris, sorry for the lack of details, so the link caries value on each profile, there are inbound links coming to each profile from our social profiles from shares tweets pins and so on, so each profile carries a link weight but the way we structure the website : thewebsite/city/profile-name , and when the subscription expires it redirects from /city/profile-name to /city, so all the link juice will be carried to the city in question, as for the frequency it depends, we have profile being reactivated after 1 week or after 2-3 month ...
-
Ionut, what specifically does the link go to and from originally and how often do members come back?
-
Hello Ionut,
Since they are subscription profiles (and thus there isnt a link value concern) a 302 might be a better option at start.
The way I would do it is set a rule of permanent user expiration and say once someone does not renew for lets say 6 months or 1 year then I make a permanent 301, until then I leave it as a 302. The length of the month may vary but that's something your analytics will tell you.
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
-
Is it a good practice to reduce number of redirections (301) after a period of time?
Is it good to use disavow tool and get rid of old URLs i.e. links for pages and posts which we have deleted from our website and added 301 on them?
On-Page Optimization | | Ravi_Rana0 -
Duplicate anchor text vs poor relevance in internal links
We're writing a number of blog posts, all based around a particular head-term (call it "women's widgets"). Each post will be centered around a different long-tail keyword (e.g. "women's brandA widgets", "women's brandB widgets", "women's type1 widgets", etc.). We want to link from the blog posts back to the main "women's widgets" category-level page on our site. Should we: a) Use the words "women's widgets" in each blog post and link that to the "women's widgets" page? This would be the most relevant, but it also seems like using the same anchor text on all of the posts, and linking to the main page, is not good since Google doesn't like seeing the same exact anchor text all the time, right? b) Link the long-tail keyword ("women's brandA widgets") to the main "women's widgets" page? That would solve the anchor text duplication issue, but then the anchor text doesn't seem relevant to the page being linked to (it might never mention "brandA" on that main page at all), and I think it would also hurt the blog post's chances of ranking for the long-tail keyword since we're basically saying that there's a more relevant page for that keyword somewhere else (i.e. you shouldn't link out from a page using the phrase you're trying to optimize that page for). c) Link a nearby word/phrase instead? For example, we could say "Trust Companyname.com for your women's widget needs", and link "Companyname.com" to the "women's widget" page. By proximity to the keyword phrase, that may help a bit, but again the relevancy of the anchor text to the page being linked to is fairly low. I'd hate to have a bunch of "click here", "read this" or "company name" anchor texts being used, just in the name of not overusing the head-term in the anchor text. Are we just missing something, or misunderstanding Google's preferences? What do you do when you don't want to overuse a keyword in anchor text, but you still want to link to a main category-level page using the head-term in order to tell Google that that is the most relevant, best page for that keyword? Is anchor text duplication more of a problem for external backlinks, and less of an issue for internal interlinking? Do you have a different suggestion, other than what I outlined above? Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | BandLeader
John0 -
Short URL's vs Optimised URL's
Howdy Mozzers! What are your thoughts on short URL's vs Optimised URL's. For example if a website currently sells wood furniture and wants to target the keyword "Wood Furniture For Sale", which URL would be preferable: Short URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture Optimised URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture-for-sale The website also uses facet navigation and selected attributes are added in a fixed order sequence after the category. For example if Cane is selected as wood type: Short URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture/Cane Optimised URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture-for-sale/Cane Which one do you prefer (between the short URL and optimised URL) and why? Cheers! MozAddict
On-Page Optimization | | MozAddict0 -
301 Redirects From a URL without Keyphrases to one With Keyphrases
I have a client that sells services. Each service offered currently has a URL structure like this: www.companyname.com/product/asp$view-id-page3022-item-24 These pages are pretty old, and I would love to have a more user-friendly URL like this: www.companyname.com/product/purple-swatch-watch If I rename the URL and do a 301 redirect, what impact will that have on search? Ideally, this page will be optimized for "purple swatch watch", but the current URL structure is so... well, you know. My apologies if this has been answered before. I tried looking through archived of 301 issues, but lost hope after my first 10 or so attempts at answered didn't help this specific issue.
On-Page Optimization | | ericav0 -
Redirection
Hi all I have these domains active:
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr
www.piensapiensa.es
http://piensapiensa.es which redirects to www.piensapiensa.es via webmastertools
http://piensapiensa.com
www.piensapiensa.com which redirects to http://piensapiensa.com via webmastertools.
I want the last three items to redirect to www.piensapiensa.es Here is part of the code of the htaccess file that I have until now:
Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.piensapiensa.es [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.piensapiensa.es/$1 [R=301,L] Thanks in advanced.0 -
Wordpress pages URL's redirection.
I was checking W3C Markup Validation and in report it was shown that that pages (not post or any other URL's just PAGES) at investmentcontrarians.com are 301 redirected. e.g. original URL "http://www.investmentcontrarians.com/debt-crisis" which is redirected to "http://www.investmentcontrarians.com/debt-crisis/" I know that its not that serious issue, but still want to know why only pages are being redirected and how can we avoid it.
On-Page Optimization | | NumeroUnoWebSolutions0 -
My nofollow link is showing as a 302\. Is this OK?
My nofollow link is showing as a 302. Is this OK? Not looking to pass any juice along but don't want to be penalized either. Thanks Buhrly
On-Page Optimization | | Buhrly0 -
Redirecting to a keyword-rich domain URL
It's best practice to choose a domain that has keyword in it. But if someone has just launched a website and the domain name does not have keyword, is it better to purchase a new domain name that has a keyword in the name and redirect existing domain to the new domain? Will that help SEO? (This just launched website does not have any traffic or links yet.)
On-Page Optimization | | Amjath0