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    4. Vanity / Short URLs 301?

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    Vanity / Short URLs 301?

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    • CoL-PR
      CoL-PR Subscriber last edited by

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • CoL-PR
        CoL-PR Subscriber @KristinaKledzik last edited by

        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

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • KristinaKledzik
          KristinaKledzik last edited by

          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

          CoL-PR 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
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