Vanity / Short URLs 301?

[CoL-PR]

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

[CoL-PR]

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

[KristinaKledzik]

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