Do my redirects on my homepage need to be 301?
-
Our domain name is something like www.I-am-cool.com but most people just type in iamcool.com After doing some research I found that those are 302 redirects and I think they should be 301. If I am correct do I need to redirect www.iamcool.com and iamcool.com or just one or the other?
-
That is exactly what I was looking for. Thank You.
-
Sorry, Niners, I wasn't clear you were talking about two different spellings of the domain as well as the www and non www versions. I had assumed that was just a typo. Sorry 'bout that.
So... if you own iamcool.com and i-am-cool-com, you essentially have four variations for the domain URL you need to address. The Search Engines consider each of these to be different sites:
- www.i-am-cool-com
- i-am-cool.com
- www.iamcool.com
- iamcool.com
Out of all of these, you're going to pick the one that is your primary site address. This will become what's known as your FQDN - Fully Qualified Domain Name. This will be the URL you use for EVERYTHING you control. All links will use this full version, it's what you'll put on business cards, in bio links on guest posts, everything.
Since you say that the version with the hyphens has been in existence the longest, I would recommend that become your primary. And further, I suspect that the www version of it probably has the most incoming links.
So,,, www.i-am-cool.com will become your primary site address - your FQDN. (Assuming you agree with what's stated above.)
Once that's decided, you now need to 301-redirect each of the other versions directly to that www.i-am-cool.com URL. (For example, you specifically want to avoid a situation where iamcoolcom redirects to www.iamcool,com, which then redirects again to the final www.i-am-cool.com.)
Once you've done the redirects, you'll want to keep a close eye on your Webmaster Tools and Analytics to make sure you're not getting 404s from pages not being caught by the redirects correctly. In addition, you can use the hostnames report in Analytics to make sure that only your FQDN is showing up, indicating all the other versions are redirecting correctly.
Hope that clears things up a little more.
Paul
-
definitely keep it then!
-
Changing it to a 301 makes sense. Do I need to change for both with the www and without? I have never quite figured out if that counts as two different urls or not.
-
The only reason we still use the one with the hyphens is because we have been using the same domain name for over ten years.
-
You definitely need to change the 302 to a 301 redirect, Niners. Typically, you check which version has the most incoming links already (since it's an existing site) and make that the primary address. Then you use the 301 redirect to point the other URL to the primary one.
Even though many people may directly type in the URL without the www, most people who are writing it as a link on a webpage will do it including the www. Having those incoming links avoid needing a redirect is more important than the folks typing in direct (since even 301s don't pass absolutely all the link authority.)
Make sense?
Paul
-
302 redirects do not pass PR so you need to 301 the site instead, if there is PR on that site. if not you can just point that domain at the DNS level and it will resolve.
but i would think the version without the hyphens is more desirable. why isn't that your main domain name? obviously you own both domains. people only use the hyphens when the domain name they want is already taken.
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
-
Using a Reverse Proxy and 301 redirect to appear Sub Domain as Sub Directory - what are the SEO Risks?
We’re in process to move WordPress blog URLs from subdomains to sub-directory. We aren’t moving blog physically, but using reverse proxy and 301 redirection to do this. Blog subdomain URL is https://blog.example.com/ and destination sub-directory URL is https://www.example.com/blog/ Our main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL site. This is on Windows server. Due to technical reasons, we can’t physically move our WordPress blog to the main website. Following is our Technical Setup Setup a reverse proxy at https://www.example.com/blog/ pointing to https://blog.example.com/ Use a 301 redirection from https://blog.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/blog/ with an exception if a traffic is coming from main WWW domain then it won’t redirect. Thus, we can eliminate infinite loop. Change all absolute URLs to relative URLs on blog Change the sitemap URL from https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml to https://www.example.com/blog/sitemap.xml and update all URLs mentioned within the sitemap. SEO Risk Evaluation We have individual GA Tracking ID and individual Google Search Console Properties for main website and blog. We will not merge them. Keep them separate as they are. Keeping this in mind, I am evaluating SEO Risks factors Right now when we receive traffic from main website to blog (or vice versa) then it is considered as referral traffic and new cookies are set for Google Analytics. What’s going to happen when its on the same domain? Which type of settings change should I do in Blog’s Google Search Console? (A). Do I need to request “Change of Address” in the Blog’s search console property? (B). Should I re-submit the sitemap? Do I need to re-submit the blog sitemap from the https://www.example.com/ Google Search Console Property? Main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL website, and blog is all about content. So does that impact SEO? Will this dilute SEO link juice or impact on the main website ranking because following are the key SEO Metrices. (A). Main website’s Avg Session Duration is about 10 minutes and bounce rate is around 30% (B). Blog’s Avg Session Duration is 33 seconds and bounce rate is over 92%
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshibhargav_200 -
Is it ok to 301 redirect this previously algorithmicly penalised site?
Hi All, Is it OK to 301 redirect site A to site B? Site A: http://goo.gl/P9Zp2y Site B: http://goo.gl/ySDCzb The story - in 2013 site a seemed to be penalised with some kind of anchor text algorithm penalty - SEO couldnt fix, so created site B and turned site A into a holding page with a no follow link to new site. SEO company worked on disavow file etc, implemented in late 2013 301 redirect site A to B in late 2013 - SEO advised to stop 301 about 8 weeks later... This was my fault i didnt realise the implications of a redirect... Stopped the redirect, but too late, as site B dropped in rankings in early 2014 - new disavow files uploaded to both sites, but damage seems done now. No longer have a SEO company, and i would ideally like to 301 redirect site A to B, as it looks messy having a holding page - but wanted to check if SEO would still strongly advise against that? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Multiple 301 Redirect Query
Hello all, I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues. I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago. We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's. Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Pages that 301 redirect to a 404
We are going through a website redesign that involves changing URL's for the pages on our site. Currently all our pages are in the format domain.com/example.html and we are moving to stip off the .html file extension so it would just be domain.com/example We have thousands of pages as the site deals with news so building a redirect for each individual page isn't really feasible. My plan is to have a generic rewrite rule that redirects any page that ends .html to the stripped off version of this. A problem I can see with this is that it will also redirect pages that don't exist. So for example, domain.com/non-existant-page.html would 301 to domain.com/non-existant-page which would then return a 404 status. What would the SEO repercussions be for this? Obviously if a page doesn't exist already then it shouldn't show up in the search engine indexes and shouldn't be a problem but I'm a bit worried about how old pages that currently legitimately 404 will be treated when they start to 301 redirect to a 404 instead. Not sure if there any other potential issues from this that I've missed either? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbb0240 -
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Removing Blogs and 301 redirect to blog home page?
Hi, I was at the MozCon conference in Seattle this Summer and heard great concepts about deleting a lot of pages on your site that are deemed excess. It got me thinking to remove all of our old blogs that were: Sales(ee) less than 400 words Flat out bad blogs When i begin removing these links, i know i will get a lot of 404 errors because of previous social links. So in your opinion, what would you do? Do i just 301 those blogs to my main /blog page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Handling 301 Redirects when Moving from IIS to Apache Linux
I am moving a blog from domain A on IIS to domain B on Linux. Same posts and pages - different domain. I'm looking for a guide, article or steps on what needs to be done on the IIS side to make sure we do this correctly. Thanks !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GlennFerrell0 -
Undo a 301 redirect
Hi there, 4 months ago I have done a redirect from one domain to another. Now, after about 120 days I have just a few results from the old domain indexed. The problem is that I believe that the old domain name had a really big impact on rankings, as it had the main keyword in the domain name. I'm wondering now if I could restore the old domain just by taking out the 301 instruction and how will search engines react. Do you have any studies on that? Would it be possible? Matt Cutts himself did it with his own domain, but he doesn't talk specifically on the effect of the rankings: http://www.thedotcomblog.com/seo/redirects-after-change-in-domain-name Thanks in advance for any help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SandraMoZ0