Usage of HTTP Status Code 303
-
Hello,
is there anybody who has got some experience with 303 HTTP Status Code?
Our software development would like to use 303 "See Others" instead of 301 for redirecting old product-links to the site-root, instead of showing 404 errors.
What is the best practise for redirecting old product links which are gone in online-shop context?
Best regards
Steffen
-
I would recommend using a 301 redirect to the home page as this will pass link juice. If they can be redirected to the specific product category that would be useful.
An alternative would be to still serve up the old page so it results in a 200 code or a 301 to a product suggestion page. Having a products like this suggestion page and or a search for products page would likely convert better than just a blanket 301 redirect to the home page.
Another thing you could do is create an intelligent "catch" page that uses the search parameter (if there is one) or the title of the page referring the site and use that as a parameter for searching your products database and serving up some relevant products.
-
It probably will not pass your link juice if any. Zhis is the difference: 301 status codes are passing on 90% of the link juice the inbound links are giving to your pages.
For users it is good to redirect them to semothing else. The fact that a products period is over does not mean that it will not be searched anymore. Keeping old pages at least in the sitemap will not blow your pages at all. I would do that, however technically if there are no inbound links pointing to the pages that you want to 303 redirect, it will not hurt your seo.
-
Hi,
our old content is definitly gone away. We have a lot of volatile content which has got a lifetime from 6-12 month and somtimes shorter. I believe keeping old URLs will blow-up indexed pages.
But my general question was about 303 code. Do you have some experience about the difference between 301/303?
BR
-
Hello,
Are your products gone forever for sure? If you place 301 or 303 the visitors clicking your pages from the serps will see a new content instead of a 404 eror page that is for sure, so it has its user side benefits. However if you are ranking for these products in google and these words are bringing in traffic to your side i would think twice to delete those pages. I you delete the actual content you are ranking with the useres and the engines will see a totally new content, so if you lose your product specific pages you will also lose your rankings sooner or later.
I would leave those pages but do a little reorganizatin on the landing page. I would push the current content a bit downwords and place a one-two line convincing text why you have finished to sell those products (why users should not serych for them longer) and give an alternate better solution for the product type they are searching. So like we have finished selling lithium batteries as the new xy technique has longer 2x life period, and has half the time to charge. You can look at these astonishing products here
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
-
Domain Level Redirects - HTTP and HTTPS
About 2 years ago (well before I started with the company), we did an http=>https migration. It was not done correctly. The http=>https redirect was never inserted into the .htaccess file. In essence, we have 2 websites. According to Google search console, we have 19,000 HTTP URLs indexed and 9,500 HTTPS URLs indexed. I've done a larger scale http=>https migration (60,000 SKUs), and our rankings dropped significantly for 6-8 weeks. We did this the right way, using sitemaps, and http and https GSC properties. Google came out recently and said that this type of rankings drop is normal for large sites. I need to set the appropriate expectations for management. Questions: How badly is the domain split affecting our rankings, if at all? Our rankings aren't bad, but I believe we are underperforming our backlink profile. Can we expect a net rankings gain when the smoke clears? There are a number of other technical SEO issues going on as well. How badly will our rankings drop (temporarily) and for how long when we add the redirect to the .htaccess file? Is there a way to mitigate the rankings impact? For example, only submitting partial sitemaps to our GSC http property? Has anyone gone through this before?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
HTTP to HTTPS Question
Hello, I have a question regarding SSL Certificates I think I know the answer to but wanted to make sure. One of our clients’ site uses http for their pages but when they started creating Registration forms they created a full duplicate site on https (so now there are two versions of all of the pages). I know due to duplicate concerns this could be an issue and needs to resolved (as well as the pros and cons of both) but if they are already set up with https does it make sense to just move everything there or in some instances would it pay to keep some pages http (using canonical tags, redirects, htccess…etc)? – Most of the information I found related to making the decision prior to having both or describing the process but I couldn’t find anything that specifically related to if both are already present. I thought that the best approach because everything’s already set up is to just move everything over to the more secure one but was curious if anybody had any insight? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R0 -
SEO Impacts if changing from https to http (or viceversa)
Hi there, I want to take the benefits (both Google's SEO rewards and increased site speed) from putting on-line my site (it's not yet live) with a SSL certificate and make it use the new HTTP/2 protocol. Now the question is: if in the future I won't renew the SSL certificate (because too expensive, maybe), so the site will run through normal HTTP, do I risk to see changes of my pages on the SERPs? Will I lose all positions that I got? Thanks in advance for your tips!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | valeron0 -
Panda 4.0 Update Affected Site - What should be a the minimum Code to Text Ratio we should aim for ?
Hi All, My eCommerce site got hit badly with the Panda 4.0 update so we have been doing some site auditing and analysis identifying issues which need addressing. We have thin/duplicate issues which I am quite sure was part of the reason we were affected by this even though we use rel=next and rel=prev along with having a separate view all page although we don't concanical tag to this page as I dont' think users would benefit from seeing to many items on one page. This led me to look at our Code to Content Ratio. We have now managed to increase it from 9% to approx 18-22% on popular pages by getting rid of unnecessary code etc. My question is , is there an ideal percentage the code to content ratio should be ?.. and what should I be aiming for ? Also any other Panda 4.0 advice would also be appreciated thanks Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
XML Sitemap & Bad Code
I've been creating sitemaps with XML Sitemap Generator, and have been downloading them to edit on my pc. The sitemaps work fine when viewing in a browser, but when I download and open in Dreamweaver, the urls don't work when I cut and paste them in the Firefox URL bar. I notice the codes are different. For example, an "&" is produced like this..."&". Extra characters are inserted, producing the error. I was wondering if this is normal, because as I said, the map works fine when viewing online.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Using a 302 re-direct from http://www to https://www to secure customer data
My website sends Customers from a http://www.mysite.com/features page to a https://www.mysite.com/register page which is an account sign-up form using a 302 re-direct. Any page that collects customer data has an authenticated SSL certificate to protect any data on the site. Is this 302 the most appropriate way of doing this as the weekly crawl picks it up as being bad practise? Is there a better alternative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ubique0 -
Anchor Text Usage
Hi, What is the best way to use anchor text during link building after recent updates from Google. I thinking of doing the following: 60% Brand Keyword (my site name)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitss
20% Click here, visit this site etc
20% myurl.com
10% a Mix of both broad & phrase match of my targetted keyword. What do you suggest Does anyone have a working strategy? Will be waiting for your replies...0