Explaining 301 redirects instead of 302
-
I am trying to explain in layman's terms to a client why using 302 for their redirects (which they have done themselves) is not right. There view is they do not seem to listen or believe what is being said to them and do not want to do permanent damage to the old domain so are using 302 redirects. I have explained over and over 301 is needed but I do not seem to be good at communicating this. Can someone give me a good example or description I can use to get my point across?
-
Keri, the problem with this analogy is that it reinforces the concept of a fallback or safety net.
Who wouldn't feel better going off to college knowing that if by some chance it didn't work out, you'd still have Mom & Dad keeping your nice warm bed and comfy room waiting for you.
That's exactly the unfortunate attitude FreshFire is up against - the site owners think it's more valuable to keep that fallback in place than to fully commit to the new site.
Which is why I suggested that maybe there's more to the issue than just "not getting it".
Paul
-
If you really think there isn't an underlying problem & he just needs a more comprehensible explanation, the best luck I've had explaining this to clients is by getting away from anything technical and from temporary/permanent and even talking about redirects at all.
I explain to them how they are actually wasting resources in competition with themselves, allowing others to gain success at their expense. (You're not gonna beat 'em with logic - gotta hit 'em in the pocketbook)
So... goes something like...
Google decides how much a site is worth. The more the site is worth, the higher it shows in the results.
Google currently thinks you have two sites for the same topic, so they are effectively competing against each other to try to gain points from Google.
Let's say your current site has a value of 8, and your old site has a value of 5.
But your biggest competitor's site has a value of 9.
So overall even though you have more "Google Value", you've split it over 2 sites so neither one of them alone has the power to beat the single site that has a score of 9.
So you're losing business opportunities to your competitor because Google places him above both of your other sites.
But if you use the technical tools available (called 301 redirecting) you can tell Google to combine the values of your 2 sites to determine the new value. You won't get to just add the two totals together (Google isn't quite that generous) but your combined site will get about 8+3 for a total of 11.
So now, once the changes have worked their way through the system, your competitor (9) is now losing opportunities to you (11) and must play catch up. And you accomplished that not with a lot of very expensive new work, but by using the existing tools that were designed just for this purpose.
Do you want to sit in the background and compete against yourself, or get out front and compete against (and have a much better chance of winning over) your competitor?
There are lots of analogies that can be created to put this concept into everyday terms, but I find in this case it's better to stick closer to the actual Search Engine paradigm.
Paul
-
When an otherwise smart person seems to obstinantly insist on ignoring good advice, I always look for a hidden or unstated reason that might better explain the actions, rather than just writing it off as "he just doesn't get it".
I suspect you may need to dig deeper to find out what it is he's afraid of that makes him think he needs to avoid "doing permanent damage to the old domain". I strongly suspect there's an underlying issue there. Maybe he doesn't fully agree with the direction of the new site? Doesn't trust its new business model or tools? You may need to do some real digging to figure out why he seems to feel so strongly that he needs to keep his failsafe or fallback position.
Paul
-
- yay! I will try.You see it's harder to explain than you think!
-
How about a 302 is when you go off to college in another state (you still keep your voter registration, your permanent address, your license plate, etc in your home state), and a 301 is when you are moving for good to another place and you're setting up residency there?
-
Do you think the graphic that Dr. Pete created might help at all?
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes
-
Exactly!!! lol - Any ideas? It's hard to explain to a non pc person....
-
Sanket, the poster of the question understands what link juice is, and why a 301 is needed. He's looking for a way to explain it to his clients to convince them.
-
I know what it means! lol I am trying to think of a way to explain it to someone not into SEO or website i.e. a laymans response!
- How to phrase it in simple terms.... -
Link juice means ranking power you can beat your competitor for ranking in Google. If any DoFollow site contains high page rank then you get high link juice from that site, if that site contains more outbound links then you get less linkjuice from that site. For example read this link.
-
They don't understand link juice....
-
Hi,
302 redirect is temporary bases and it does not passes any link juice and inbound links of that page, in most of cases it does not use. 302 you can use when your site is temporary under-construction and your content temporarily moved somewhere else. 302 refers to the HTTP status code so when you open that page and age does not forund you get 404 status code. If you are using 302 redirect then Create a custom error page for 404s which will give visitors that encounter your error page an indication of how to get back on track. Read this link for knowing more about how to use 302 http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/
301 redirect is permanent redirect and pases between 90-99% of link juice and inbound links and page rank. It is best method to implementing redirects on website. 301 redirect is preferable for both you and search engine also.
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
One of our employees took an SEO class recently. She was told that having too many 301 redirects can hurt SEO. I have never heard of 301 redirects as having a negative impact. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Smart_Start0 -
Penalty after 301 redirect?
We run a training center. We had 1 main website and 2 dedicated websites to certain themes. The 2 dedicated websites are older and the main website is about 6 months old. The 2 dedicated websites had a top 5 ranking for their most important keywords. 2 weeks ago we imported all the content from the dedicated websites into the main website. Then immediately after we did a perfect 301 redirect of these websites to the main website. 2 SEO companies checked it for us and so I'm very sure this is done right. Google immediately caught this up and gave the main website a boost. We where in the top 10 for many important keywords for 1 week. The next week all our rankings dropped. We only have a top 50 ranking for 10 keywords. Before it was 75 keywords in the top 20. Do you know what could have caused this? Any suggestion, thought, ... is welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
Should You Use 301 Redirects When Switching To A Secure SSL Server?
Hi, our client has switched from a non-secure server to a secure (SSL) server.. but the non secure pages still exist, i.e. http://www.stainlesshandrailsystems.co.uk/balustrade-systems.html (non-secure)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webpresence
https://www.stainlesshandrailsystems.co.uk/balustrade-systems.html (secure) We assumed that we should 301 redirect the http pages to the new https pages using the following htaccess rule; RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R,L] HOWEVER! both of the above pages show the same Page Authority (PA) and Pagerank (PR).. does this mean that they are being seen as the same page, do we really need to employ 301 redirects? Many thanks in advance, much appreciated. 🙂 Lee1 -
Should /node/ URLs be 301 redirect to Clean URLs
Hi All! We are in the process of migrating to Drupal and I know that I want to block any instance of /node/ URLs with my robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing them. My question is, should we set 301 redirects on the /node/ versions of the URLs to redirect to their corresponding "clean" URL, or should the robots.txt blocking and canonical link element be enough? My gut tells me to ask for the 301 redirects, but I just want to hear additional opinions. Thank you! MS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
How does Google treat chained 301 redirects?
I did the following two chained 301 redirects (A->B->C) Plural to Singular to New Domain A. http://domain1.com/filenames B. http://domain1.com/filename C. http://domain2.com/filename To new domain without www and then back to origining domain A. http://www.domain1.com/filename B. http://domain2.com/filename C. http://domain1.com/fifilename How much link juicy will be rediectetoto URL C in above two scenarios?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bull1350 -
Does 301 Redirect solve many problems?
Hi, there are many problems with my site. I have a lot of duplicate page titles and a lot of missing meta tags. However, I think most of them are BECAUSE i have a lot of duplicate pages. So I have read some articles and I will 301 redirect all the duplicated pages. Will this solve the problem with duplicate titles and missing meta tags as well? For example, my homepage has like 10 duplicated pages. Since they are duplicated, they have the same titles and they are all missing meta tags. I am planning to fill in meta tags JUST for the canonical page and redirect all duplicated pages to that page. Is this a good practice? Also, just curious, do different title tags and different meta tag description make the pages "not duplicated?" I assume it will still appear as duplicated.... Sorry if this was confusing...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Redirects, 302 and geolocation for multi-regional .com website
One of our sites utilizes a single .com domain but offers differentiated article page for users depending on their location. For example: example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-gb-en for UK example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-us-en for US example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-au-en for Aus Currently we use example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo as the relative link on the site and then the user is redirected by 302 to the correct article for them based on their location. I've read countless pages about 302 redirects (and largely why you shouldn't use them because of link juice, indexing etc) but what alternative can we use since we don't want to permanently redirect to one URL but rather redirect to the relevant URL based on the users location. All the stuff I've read talks about redirecting using 301s but this surely only works when you are redirecting from one URL to one permanent new URL as opposed to redirecting to one of many country specific URLs. It's not really a solution for us to set up separate TLDs for each country so what is the best mechanism for redirecting user to the correct article for them and making sure that link juice is shared, pages are indexed etc? I hope I've explained this well enough for any of you to offer advice. Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
302 redirect
Aloha, I do a small study of 302 redirects. I wonder if you have any examples of sites where the use of a 302 is made.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon
For example, to ski resorts: where there is a summer version and a winter version. In this case, the field of 302 will return the version of the relevant season. ex: http://www.valmorel.com/ >> 302 >> http://www.valmorel.com/fr/hiver/accueil-hiver.html I wonder if the use of 302 is the right solution.
What do you think? D.0