Vanity URL's and http codes
-
We have a vanity URL that as recommended is using 301 http code, however it has been discovered the destination URL needs to be updated which creates a problem since most browsers and search engines cache 301 redirects.
Is there a good way to figure out when a vanity should be a 301 vs 302/307?
If all vanity URL's should use 301, what is the proper way of updating the destination URL?
Is it a good rule of thumb that if the vanity URL is only going to be temporary and down the road could have a new destination URL to use 302, and all others 301?
Cheers,
-
Like I said in the last paragraph, if this is temporary, 302 redirect the original destination URL to the new destination URL as well as the redirecting URL to the new destination. If these changes are permanent, make them 301 instead of 302 redirects.
-
That does answer my question partly. How do you handle the cached URL for the original 301 that points to the invalid URL?
Example. www.bob.com/hello points to www.bob.com/directory/folder/file.aspx
It needs to now point to www.bob.com/directory/folder2/file2.aspx
If browsers and search engines cache the first 301 since it's meant to be permanent, visitors that have been to the first URL will not get passed off to the new one.
-
Let me make sure I understand you. You have a vanity URL like bit.ly or something. It redirects to your website which is bitly.com or something like that. This redirect is a 301 permanent redirect.
Are you asking if bitly.com changed what you should do with the redirect? That's how I understood the question. So say bitly.com now goes to bitly.com/new or something along those lines.
If this is the case, all you want to do is change your 301 redirect of bit.ly to the new destination URL and keep it a 301. That is, unless bitly.com/new is only a temporary URL. If it will be reverting back to bitly.com then don't do that.
Instead, when you redirect bitly.com to bitly.com/new use a 302 redirect, keeping the 301 from bit.ly to bitly.com in tact. Hopefully that answers your question. Let me know if your scenario is different.
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
-
What happens when we change redirects to pass linkjuice to different pages from backlinks? Google's stand?
Hi Moz community, We have employed different pages (topics) at same URLs for years. This has brought different backlinks to same page which has led to non relevancy of backlinks. Now we are planning to redirect some URLs which may improve or drop rankings of certain pages. If we roll back the redirects in case of ranking drop, will there be any negative impact from Google? Does Google notice anything about redirect changes beside just passing pagerank from backlinks? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Placement of /p/ in URL structure for ecommerce site product URLs
Hi, We're a discussion about how to structure a clients ecommerce site product page URLs where 12345 represent the product SKU/number: https://domain.com/Item--i-12345 https://domain.com/product-name/p/12345 https://domain.com/p/12345 It's a toss up between the second and the third URL, but the SEO company is saying the third is best because of the placement with the /p/ and creating a silo for "products" that help search engines recognize it is a product. Does anyone have thoughts on this? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | AliMac260 -
SEO Myth-Busters -- Isn't there a "duplicate content" penalty by another name here?
Where is that guy with the mustache in the funny hat and the geek when you truly need them? So SEL (SearchEngineLand) said recently that there's no such thing as "duplicate content" penalties. http://searchengineland.com/myth-duplicate-content-penalty-259657 by the way, I'd love to get Rand or Eric or others Mozzers aka TAGFEE'ers to weigh in here on this if possible. The reason for this question is to double check a possible 'duplicate content" type penalty (possibly by another name?) that might accrue in the following situation. 1 - Assume a domain has a 30 Domain Authority (per OSE) 2 - The site on the current domain has about 100 pages - all hand coded. Things do very well in SEO because we designed it to do so.... The site is about 6 years in the current incarnation, with a very simple e-commerce cart (again basically hand coded). I will not name the site for obvious reasons. 3 - Business is good. We're upgrading to a new CMS. (hooray!) In doing so we are implementing categories and faceted search (with plans to try to keep the site to under 100 new "pages" using a combination of rel canonical and noindex. I will also not name the CMS for obvious reasons. In simple terms, as the site is built out and launched in the next 60 - 90 days, and assume we have 500 products and 100 categories, that yields at least 50,000 pages - and with other aspects of the faceted search, it could create easily 10X that many pages. 4 - in ScreamingFrog tests of the DEV site, it is quite evident that there are many tens of thousands of unique urls that are basically the textbook illustration of a duplicate content nightmare. ScreamingFrog has also been known to crash while spidering, and we've discovered thousands of URLS of live sites using the same CMS. There is no question that spiders are somehow triggering some sort of infinite page generation - and we can see that both on our DEV site as well as out in the wild (in Google's Supplemental Index). 5 - Since there is no "duplicate content penalty" and there never was - are there other risks here that are caused by infinite page generation?? Like burning up a theoretical "crawl budget" or having the bots miss pages or other negative consequences? 6 - Is it also possible that bumping a site that ranks well for 100 pages up to 10,000 pages or more might very well have a linkuice penalty as a result of all this (honest but inadvertent) duplicate content? In otherwords, is inbound linkjuice and ranking power essentially divided by the number of pages on a site? Sure, it may be some what mediated by internal page linkjuice, but what's are the actual big-dog issues here? So has SEL's "duplicate content myth" truly been myth-busted in this particular situation? ??? Thanks a million! 200.gif#12
Algorithm Updates | | seo_plus0 -
URLs contains other language than English
I am in need of your advice in regards to urls of my new sites. I have got one site from gulf region site is in English and Arabic language. The issue is we are getting url from both. Some are Arabic, do you guys think it will effect the ranking result? url example is : www.mydomain.com/بيع-بي-سيارة
Algorithm Updates | | Mustansar0 -
SERP's & Search Engine Differences
Hey, I recently modified my pages to conform more closely to the "A" page rankings for MOZ's on-page report card but saw declines in my keyword rankings. They keywords in question appear in my title tag, description, one image alt tag, either an h1 or h2 tag, and 4 times throughout the text of the document. I don't think MOZ would recommend these changes if it was seen as stuffing - is there any other reason why my rankings might have dropped by 1-4 positions? Also, does anyone know of a good article/book for Yahoo/Bing SEO? My Yahoo & Bing rankings are far below Google's in most cases. Any help would be appreciated! -Michael
Algorithm Updates | | Stew2220 -
Why am i not ranking in the top 50 for the keyword 'cocktails' even though all my other cocktail related keywords are in the first 2 pages of Google???
I have checked the first 50 pages of google for my website www.socialandcocktail.co.uk using the keyword 'cocktails'. It is NOT to be found. However, if I search for other keyword combinations eg cocktail recipes, cocktail bars etc they are all in the first 2 pages! What is going on????????
Algorithm Updates | | cocktailboss0 -
Should We Switch from Several Exact Match URLs to Subdomains Instead?
We are a company with one product customized for different vertical markets. Our sites are each setup on their own unique domains:
Algorithm Updates | | contactatonce
contactatonce.com (Brand)
autodealerchat.com (Auto Vertical)
apartmentchat.com (Apartment Vertical)
chatforrealestate.com (Real Estate Vertical) We currently rank well on the respective keyword niches including:
- auto dealer chat (exact match), automotive chat, dealer chat
- apartment chat (exact match), property chat, multifamilly chat
- chat for real estate (exact match), real estate chat To simplify the user experience we are considering moving to a single domain and subdomain structure: contactatonce.com
auto.contactatonce.com
apartment.contactatonce.com
realestate.contactatonce.com QUESTIONS:
1. Considering current Google ranking strategies, do we stand to lose keyword related traffic by making this switch?
2. Are there specific examples you can point to where an individual domain and subdomains each ranked high on Google across a variety of different niches? (I'm not talking about Wikipedia, Blogger, Blogspot, Wordpress, Yahoo Answers, etc. which are in their own class, but a small to mid size brand). Thank you,
Aaron0 -
How come google image search doesn't link to the right page?
For one site I work with the images link to the home page of the site rather than the page the image lives on. I think this is hurting my bounce rate quite a bit. Thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | NetvantageMarketing0