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Vanity / Short URLs 301?
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Hi everyone,
I'm working on a website that uses a lot of short urls eg http://www.forest.com/oaktrees. A quick check reveals these are currently 302 status.
My question is should these be made 301s - a lot of them are in off-page content and looking at GA attract a lot of clicks.
I've not managed to see a definitive answer to this after several Google searches. All help and advice greatly appreciated.
Bw
Jon
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Thanks Kristina,
Great - thanks for clarifying, that's the exact explanation I was looking for. Good news for a wide collection of URLs
Best ,
Jon
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Hi Jon,
You should 301 redirect (you should rarely to never 302 redirect) all vanity URLs to the URL that you want to rank organically.
A 302 redirect is a temporary one, so it's telling search engines that the vanity URL is the real URL for the page, but it's under construction/temporarily broken/being revamped, so you have to send visitors to another page, just for now. A 301 redirect tells search engines that the vanity URL is just a vanity URL and that the search engine should index the URL that the vanity URL is leading to.
SEOmoz has a pretty good explanation of it all: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection.
Best,
Kristina
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