Volusion eCommerce Site 302s and Canonicalization

[anneoaks]

There have been a couple other threads concerning this topic so I apologize, but I have an iteration on the main question that has not been answered.

Crawl Diagnostics is giving me a bunch of 302 temporary redirect notices. For example, here is a page title URL:
http://store.in-situ.com/Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/0073380.htm

and here is the redirect:
http://store.in-situ.com/Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/tape-clt-meter.htm?1=1&CartID=0

The first link is actually a child product of:
http://store.in-situ.com//Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/tape-clt-meter.htm

Volusion tech support told me they believe most of them are meta redirects but could not find any documentation on them. All the other threads concerning this have said to either change the 302s to 301s, which I don't think is possible, or to add a nofollow tag.

My question is do I need to do anything if both those pages are canonical to the parent product? Should I be passing on the linkjuice if neither of those pages are of high value?

[Volusion.com]

This is correct.

[drewk]

Thank you for the details Nathan. I will contact Volusion directly. But to summarize for any other users happening upon this thread:

The answer to your question is that no, we are not planing to change all of our URLs at once. This will be an ongoing need, perhaps maybe 10 URLs per month on a continuing basis. The scenario is that in the past, when we made an engineering change to our products, we did not generally issue a new product code in Volusion. But for tracking, warranty, and UL listing purposes, going forward, we need to begin issuing new product codes when engineering changes occur. So, when we make a form/fit/function change to a product 12345-A, we will need to create a new product 12345-B.

The solution of canonical relationship links is not applicable here, because we are not just talking about SEO. Any visitor who arrives on 12345-A need to be taken to 12345-B. The canonical will help the search engines avoid duplicate indexing, but it is just as important for us to manage the visits of real users (who may arrive from links other than those in search engine results). So, we need a redirect. Volusion does provide a method for this (http://support.volusion.com/article/using-redirects-products-volusion), but this method issues a 302 redirect which is not desirable for SEO purposes.

And Volusion also provides a method for administering 301 redirects, but only when the requested page does not exist.

So, in the reply from Nathan above, he is recommending to physically delete the old product from the database so that the original page does not exist, and set up redirects using the Volusion application, after the deletion has been done.

There are some details to be considered when taking this approach, so we are going to contact Volusion directly to work through those. But I wanted to summarize here to help others who may have a similar need. Nathan, if I've incorrectly summarized, please add-on. Thanks.

[Volusion.com]

Hi drewk,

Are you wanting to supplant your existing URLs with new URLs? If this is the case the Volusion 301 manager will work for you:

1. Back up your product's database

2. Map your legacy URLs to your new equivalent. Might want to save a copy in Drive or Excel. Since you are creating new URLs, make sure they are both search and user friendly.

3. Add in your 301's and remove your legacy pages. I STRONGLY suggest testing this on a few low priority pages first before confidently rolling it out across the site. The 301 manager will only return the 301 response if the legacy page is removed. A hidden product is still an active page.

4. Submit the new URLs from your test to the search engines; i.e. Google Fetch via Google Webmaster Tools and make sure Google recognizes the 301 redirects and has indexed your new URLs. This may take a couple days.

5. Assuming this process goes smoothly for you, roll it out across your website. Depending on how large your website is, you might want to do this slowly to minimize any temporary loss in rankings and traffic.

Basically, this is definitely a delicate process and we don't usually recommend merchants to change product codes holistically. I'd recommend working with our SEO services team if you are hesitant about executing this: http://www.volusion.com/ecommerce-seo-services

If you do want to keep legacy URLs and create new URLs with new product codes, you can add the new URLs as canonicals on the legacy pages. There is no guarantee Google or the other search engines will respect this directive, but they should. This is a safer route, but you'll have many more pages to manage and there is no guarantee the search engines will rank your new URLs over the legacy. Again, please contact our services team to go over all your options.

Regards,

Nathan

[drewk]

Nathan,

We have a very similar question, and would like your opinion. We are also a Volusion customer, and in the near future will need to create new revisions of many of our existing product codes. For tracking reasons, we wish to create a new product code. Because Volusion can only perform a redirect when the original requested page does not exist, we were planning to use this procedure here: http://support.volusion.com/article/using-redirects-products-volusion.

However, when we tested this procedure, which seems to apply to our scenario, the Volusion application issues a 302 redirect instead of a 301 redirect. And I'm very hesitant to use this because 302 redirects evidently pass 0% link juice (https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection).

Nakul above wrote that possibly a combination of the 302 redirect PLUS a canonical might be the solution. However, I'm not yet sure if the canonical tag on the child product would be followed if the page has already redirected (via 302) to the parent page.

Do you have any insight you can share on this, specific to how Volusion recommends to handle this scenario?

[Everett]

It's always good to see vendors helping out on here. Thanks Nathan!

[Volusion.com]

Hi Taylor, Nakul is correct. Please let me know if I can provide any further assistance.

Regards,

Nathan

[NakulGoyal]

Taylor, you are 100% on the right track. All the answers exist in your question.

#1. These are "redirect notices", not errors. More like warnings.
#2. As long as they are canonicalized correctly, which you said "do I need to do anything if both those pages are canonical to the parent product".

There's absolutely nothing you need to do. You are good. It's always good and important to verify these technical SEO issues. I hope this helps.