Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does 302 pass link juice?
-
Hi! We have our content under two subdomains, one for the English language and one for Spanish. Depending on the language of the browser, there's a 302 redirecting to one of this subdomains.
However, our main domain (which has no content) is receiving a lot of links - people rather link to mydomain.com than to en.mydomain.com.
Does the 302 passing any link juice? If so, to which subdomain?
Thank you!
-
Hi Candida,
The 302 isn't passing any juice. I'm following up on old questions that are still marked unanswered, and wondering if you decided to do anything different here, and if so, how it turned out for you (or if you still have questions).
Thanks!
-
Hi Candida,
I would suggest that you shouldn't use 302 redirects because they won't pass any link juice, but not only because of this.
Instead of automaticaly redirecting the users without their consent, you should let them decide in what language they want to see the website.
For example, I'm french, but my browser's language is set to english. If I click a french result in the SERPs, I wouldn't want to be redirected to the english version.
Also, by automaticaly redirecting the users to their browser's language, this mean you will automaticaly redirect GoogleBot to your english website and prevent him from indexing your spanish website.
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
302's won't be passing link juice the same way as a 301 does (or really at all).
Links to mydomain .com won't be counted as a link to en.mydomain .com, however, depending on your set up you may still be getting some of the domain authority to it (as in the search engines can see it's obviously the same domain). I wouldn't be relying on this however.
Do you want the English language version to be more popular than the Spanish? I assume it's too late to make the subdomain the es. version?
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
-
All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself
Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!0 -
Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice
I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to: keep each page’s content exactly the same keep the same domain name 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content. The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls. I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.” Here’s my question: 1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic? 2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url? 3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirbyf0 -
Linking to URLs With Hash (#) in Them
How does link juice flow when linking to URLs with the hash tag in them? If I link to this page, which generates a pop-over on my homepage that gives info about my special offer, where will the link juice go to? homepage.com/#specialoffer Will the link juice go to the homepage? Will it go nowhere? Will it go to the hash URL above? I'd like to publish an annual/evergreen sort of offer that will generate lots of links. And instead of driving those links to homepage.com/offer, I was hoping to get that link juice to flow to the homepage, or maybe even a product page, instead. And just updating the pop over information each year as the offer changes. I've seen competitors do it this way but wanted to see what the community here things in terms of linking to URLs with the hash tag in them. Can also be a use case for using hash tags in URLs for tracking purposes maybe?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Do 404s really 'lose' link juice?
It doesn't make sense to me that a 404 causes a loss in link juice, although that is what I've read. What if you have a page that is legitimate -- think of a merchant oriented page where you sell an item for a given merchant --, and then the merchant closes his doors. It makes little sense 5 years later to still have their merchant page so why would removing them from your site in any way hurt your site? I could redirect forever but that makes little sense. What makes sense to me is keeping the page for a while with an explanation and options for 'similar' products, and then eventually putting in a 404. I would think the eventual dropping out of the index actually REDUCES the overall link juice (ie less pages), so there is no harm in using a 404 in this way. It also is a way to avoid the site just getting bigger and bigger and having more and more 'bad' user experiences over time. Am I looking at it wrong? ps I've included this in 'link building' because it is related in a sense -- link 'paring'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Link Juice + multiple links pointing to the same page
Scenario
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
The website has a menu consisting of 4 links Home | Shoes | About Us | Contact Us Additionally within the body content we write about various shoe types. We create a link with the anchor text "Shoes" pointing to www.mydomain.co.uk/shoes In this simple example, we have 2 instances of the same link pointing to the same url location.
We have 4 unique links.
In total we have 5 on page links. Question
How many links would Google count as part of the link juice model?
How would the link juice be weighted in terms of percentages?
If changing the anchor text in the body content to say "fashion shoes" have a different impact? Any other advise or best practice would be appreciated. Thanks Mark0 -
Does a 302 redirect pass penalties?
I'm having problems finding a definitive answer to this question, there is a lot of rumour and gossip out there but nothing I can rely on. I'm working with a site that received an unnatural links notice followed by a massive drop in search traffic. Looking at the link profile it's pretty much jacked beyond repair and I have recommended that we move over to a fresh domain. However, it's an established brand with many more sources of traffic than organic search. There's no way we can burn all their repeat visits, loyal customers, brand recognition that they've built up over the years so I want to redirect from the old domain to the new. This is not to try and make any SEO gain from the previous site, frankly we don't give a crap about that. We just want to maintain the brand. A 302 is a temporary redirect, this will be a permanent move BUT a 301 will pass on the penalty. So can we safely use a 302 redirect in this situation or is there a better alternative (meta refresh?) Thanks for your help! MB.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBarker0 -
One Way Links vs Two Way Links
Hi, Was speaking to a client today and got asked how damaging two way links are. i.e. domaina.com links to domainb.com and domainb.com links back to domaina.com. I need a nice simple layman's explanation of if/how damaging they are compared to one way links. And please don't answer with you lose link juice as I have a job explaining link juice.... I am explaining things to a non techie! Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Link Age as SEO factor?
Hi Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ? If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?0