Have a problem with our home page. Is temporary 301 redirect an option?
-
Hey Mozers,
I discovered this morning that the home page for my website is rendering fine in Chrome and Firefox, but very poorly in IE. My analytics show that over 50% of my visitors are using IE. As a result of the problem, IE has a bounce rate 32% higher than other browsers.
I'm not a web developer and I'm fairly new to SEO, so I'm guessing that it's going to take me at least a couple days to get it fixed. In the meantime, I was considering doing a 301 redirect from the home page to the largest category page in hopes of keeping some of the IE users from bouncing while I get the home page sorted out.
Would there be any long term negative effects from this once I get the page sorted out and take the 301 off it? Are there any other solutions that would be better?
Thanks for the help!
-
The real questoin is : if you think your category page converts better than your homepage - why do have a homepage at all?
-
Thanks Matt. Glad to have helped
-
Thanks guys! I'm glad I asked. You guys rock!
-
That pretty much covers it.
Matt, if you do decide to implement such a redirect as you describe, absolutely make sure that it's a 302 redirect, not a 301 Redirect. 301's are permanent (as in the message a 301 gives to search bots), 302's are temporary.
As Sebes says though, your best bet is to not redirect your homepage. As you say it will take you a couple of days to fix the browser issue, maybe slightly longer, it won't make much difference from your current situation if you just leave the homepage as it is until it's resolved. Better to be safe in the medium & long-term rather than the very short term and risk harming your site by redirecting your homepage.
Regards
Simon
-
Short answer: DONT!
Repair the glitch even if it is a little bit longer. Let me phrase it this way: "redirects are serious business" and not for html problems.
More on redirects and statuscodes: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/http-status-codes and http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
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 Redirects to relative URLs not absolute a problem?
Hi we recently did a migration and a lot of content changed locations see: https://d.pr/i/RvqI81 Basically, the 301 goes to the correct location but its a relative URL (as you can see from the screenshot) rather than absolute URL. Do you think this is a high priority issue from an SEO standpoint, should we get the developer to change the redirects to absolute? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
Redirect 301 still works?
Hi, yesterday a friend said that 301 redirects does not transfer your page rank or domain autorithy anymore. I could'nt find anything in internet saying it, but I decided to ask you guys, since I think you are very reliable. so, 301 redirects wroks for transfer page rank, and i can create better domains and transfer everything, or this strategy is gone forever now?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chablau0 -
To redirect or not to redirect, that is the question
I work for a software company that is redeveloping the website (same domain.) We have tons of content in the form of articles and documents for support, how to use the product better, case studies, and blog posts. I've downloaded a landing page report and many of these have low impressions and little or no clicks (some ranked high other very low.) Should I redirect all this content to the new site where some of it won't exist or forget about it because of the lack of juice? Is there a rule-of-thumb threshold for redirecting for content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody15969167212220 -
Does Google make continued attempts to crawl an old page one it has followed a 301 to the new page?
I am curious about this for a couple of reasons. We have all dealt with a site who switched platforms and didn't plan properly and now have 1,000's of crawl errors. Many of the developers I have talked to have stated very clearly that the HTacccess file should not be used for 1,000's of singe redirects. I figured If I only needed them in their temporarily it wouldn't be an issue. I am curious if once Google follows a 301 from an old page to a new page, will they stop crawling the old page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RossFruin0 -
301 redirect rule
Hi there, I have a website that has hundreds of links with a "question mark" at the end of URLs. For example: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQandil
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory?
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/? I'm want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess file but don't know what exactly to add. Ideally I want the URLs above to be: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/ Any help is most appreciated. Thanks
Issa0 -
301 Redirect Dilemma - Website redesign
Hi Guys, We are redesigning a clients ecommerce site. As part of the process, we're changing the URL structure to make it more friendly. I have put together a provisional 301 redirect plan but I'm not sure just how far I need to go with it. So far I have extract all the pages from the existing site that Google Webmaster Tools says have links pointing at them - this totals 93 pages. I have matched each page like for like to the new website structure. My next step was to pull the landing pages report from Google Analytics, I have extracted the pages that received entrances over the last 6 weeks. This totals 553, less the redirects I have already done and cleaning up some Google Translate pages I have circa 410 pages left. Many of these pages has more than 1 URL pointing to that page. I'm debating how important it is that that all of these remaining 410 pages have individual redirects set up for them one by one. I have to rule out regex because there is no pattern that makes sense given that I have already set up redirects for the first 93 pages that have external links. My question therefore is how important are 301 redirects on pages that have no external links and receive less than 10 entrances over a 6 week previous period? Do I need to 301 every single product on the old site to it's corresponding page on the new site? Also, I'm not sure how to treat pages that have mutliple URL's on the old site, the existing URL structure is such a mess that in some instances I have 5 URL's for one product page? I could feasibly create 5 seperate redirects but is this necessary? Also what about speed considerations, the server is going to have to load these redirects and it may slow the site down. I'm sitting at 100 odd so far. Any answers are most appreciated. Thanks Derek.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseo0 -
301 redirect every pages?
Good evening, my question might sound stupid but please forgive me, I am still learning SEO. If I build a new site that will replace an existing site. Is there any point to do a 301 redirect for pages that had no inbound link so, no juice to pass? I kind of think that it would be a better practice to 301 redirect each pages to a page that make sense on the new web site .... but here is why I think that. Why I say that If I am lucky, many of my old web site pages will be indexed, many of them having no inbound links. So once the new web site online, until all my new web sites pages are indexed, I could imagine Google would send people to the index pages (the old ones that do not exist anymore)... I am right? So in that case, if I do a 301 redirect only for pages that have inbound links, the user would end up on a 404 page. Could you tell me if it make sense how I think? Thanks a lot !! Nancy P.S. I would not redirect if it make no sense to the user. I fully understand that we must always keep the user experience in mind in any 404 and 301 redirect decisions. But to simplify the question, just suppose it is ok from a user perspective to map every old site pages to a page in new web site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnigmaSolution0 -
Should I build links to the home page or a url containing the keyword?
I run an IT company and the company name does not contain the key word I am trying to rank on. I also have a bunch of pages with page rank that containing the actual keywords, for example: http://www.mycompanyname.com/tech-support/locations/brighton My target keyword is "Tech Support Brighton" My Home page is PR4 and my location based pages are PR3. My plan was to build 3 or 4 location pages for the locations we provide tech support for and target location based keyword Anchor text to these URL's e.g "Tech Support Brighton" and then for the home page build links that have the anchor text "Tech Support". Does this sound sane? Many Thanks, K
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0
