Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is a redirect based on a session cookie hurting rankings?
-
My clients business is divided in chain stores. All stores are set under the same franchise. There is one domain www.company.com with branches like www.company.com/location1/content and www.company.com/location2/content etc. I've taken care of duplicate content issues with rel="canonical" and duplicate page titles are also not a concern, anymore.
Right now the concept is like this: If you visit the site for the first time you get to choose between the locations. Then a cookie is set and once you revisit www.company.com it will redirect you via a php header command to the location stored in your cookie: www.company.com/location1/content.
My question is if this might hurt rankings in some kind of way as these aren't permanent redirects with a 301 but rather individual ones, based on your cookie.
-
Thank you for your answers. As far as I can see, everything is getting crawled, but I also submitted an XML sitemap via webmaster tools. I decided to disable the cookie redirect for a few weeks to see if there are any changes in ranking.
-
You may want to see how your website cache for your homepage looks like on Google. Maybe its reading the wrong header everytime. My suggestion would be to check that 1st. If it shows fine, I dont think it will hurt your rankings as such. If you have rel=caononical in place correctly, you would be fine. It would be worthy to identify your pages where you want rankings and based on that, you could diagnose.
-
A few things to think about.
If done right I don't think this will effect your rankings much, if at all. You're certainly not the only site that does this and although I've never done something similar with a php header redirect, georouting of visitors based on IP is something I do all the time (and could be something you might want to look into? - http://www.maxmind.com/)
Your concerns here should be how is Google getting around your site? Is your homepage just a location select screen which it then has to crawl individually (a la paradisepoker[dot]com) or is there a default site they'll see and only later find a link to the location versions? If I (or specifically Google) don't accept cookies what can I see?
People linking into your site will be splitting the value a bit, even if you use the canonical tag. What version of the site do you get links to and is that ranking better than the location variations? Would you be better not using the canonical tag but targeting links into each with location qualifiers to keywords?
As I say, if it's done right I don't think you'll be hurting yourself, but would need to look into it a bit more to say for definite.
-
Are all pages being indexed?
How do the rank relative to each other, is the home pahe ranking well?
playing with redirects is temping fate i think,
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
-
Page Rank Flow
I wonder if someone can help me understand clearly page rank flow. If we have a website with a Home page, Services, About and Contact as a very basic website and the page rank will flow to each of those pages from the Home page (i'm not including internal linking between pages or anchor text from the home page content - this is a question purely about home page flow via the main navigation). If the Services page had 3 drop down pages. Would the home page rank also flow to each of these or is it going to the Services page which then distributes it to the three drop down. So instead of Home page rank flowing to 3 pages 33% each - it is flowing to 6 pages 16.6% each. Or is it flowing to 3 pages - 33.3% then the Services pages get a third of 33.3% ->10.1% I know this is simplifying it all a great deal- but it is the basic concept I am trying to grasp on this simple example. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Company name ranking
Hi all, I hope somebody can share their thoughts on the below. A web designer launched my client's new website and I have been tasked with the SEO. I was approached with an immediate problem, www.clientswebsite.co.uk was ranking 9th for their company name after being indexed by Google. The search results above www.clientswebsite.co.uk were related to my client but not all, for example a direct competitor was also ranking. I have been working on the SEO for 2-3 weeks and I just managed to get to 3rd position for the company name, and then www.clientswebsite.co.uk disappeared from page 1! And now instead, an irelevant sub page is now ranking for the company name on page 2 (a contact page). I have checked and the home page is still indexed (did a site: check). The only problem software picks up is a redirect chain (http://homepage -> http://www.homepage -> https://homepage) the web developers said it wouldn't impact rankings (when I asked them to edit the htaccess file to fix it) I've listed below the SEO tasks I completed whilst attempting to rank the company name: I set up analytics and webmaster tools, in which I set up preferred domain (www) Added a sitemap Edited meta data making sure company name was included I contacted the websites above www.clientswebsite.co.uk that were relevant and asked them to place a link linking to their new website, I was successful with a couple of these. I placed www.clientswebsite.co.uk on all of their social media profiles I reformatted headers on their home page, making sure the H1 included my client's company name I found 2 extra versions of my client's home page (not exact copies, but very similar content) that had been published, so I decided to 301 redirect these to the correct home page Activated SSL and forced to HTTPS I would really appreciate it if anyone could share their thoughts here, whether it be explanations or possible solutions Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
My homepage redirects to itself?
Hi there - I'm not a SEO so help would be appreciated! Moz is telling me we have a redirect loop but the URLs are the same. https://www.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/ Why is my homepage creating a redirect loop to itself? We use Wordpress and I do not have any redirects listed for our homepage. Could this have something to do with switching to https in April? Thanks, Katherine
Technical SEO | | kmmartin0 -
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed. Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
DNS vs IIS redirection
I'm working on a project where a site has gone through a rebrand and is therefore also moving to a new domain name. Some pages have been merged on the new site so it's not a lift and shift job and so I'm writing up a redirect plan. Their IT dept have asked if we want redirects done by DNS redirect or IIS redirect. Which one will allow us to have redirects on a page level and not a domain level? I think IIS may be the right route but would love your thoughts on this please.
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Today1 -
What to do with 302 redirects being indexed
Hi there, Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor. For example: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/ In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL; en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/ (there is no content here, and never has been). This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links. Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting. Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable. But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index? Is the canonical tag the best way? I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | etruvian0 -
Htaccess redirect with question mark
Hi I have a problem setting up my htaccess for a specific page that has a question mark in the link, and one that has a space in the link and also a question mark. So I would like 2 redirects in my htaccess like that: www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=pagename1 to www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=page name2 to www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html I have tried with something like this but doesn't work: RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^page.php?page=pagename1 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html" [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^page.php?page=page name2 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html" [R=301,L] Could someone tell me what exactly I have to change? Thanks
Technical SEO | | darkanweb0 -
Subdomain and Domain Rankings
I have read here that domain names with keywords might add a boost to your search rank For instance using a completely inane example monkey-fights.com might get a boost compared to mfl.com (monkey fighting league) when searching for "monkey fights" There seems to be a hot debate as to how much bonus the first domain might get over the second, but leaving that aside for the moment. Question 1. Would monkey-fights.mfl.com get the same kind of bonus as a root domain bonus? Question 2. If the answer to 1 above was yes would a 301 redirect from the suddomain URL to root domain URL retain that bonus I was just thinking on how hard it is to get root domains these days that are not either being squatted on etc. and if this might be a way to get the same bonus, or maybe subdomains are less bonus prone and so it would be a waste of time Thanks
Technical SEO | | bThere0