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.
303 redirect
-
Hi,
303 redirect is a good thing or not ?
I have a homepage in 2 languages FR and EN > mywebsite.com/fr/ and mywebsite.com/en/.
A 303 redirect is on mywebsite.com to mywebsite.com/fr/.
Thanks
D.
-
Hi Wesley & D.,
I really appreciate the what you said & did however I did not administer the experiment or create content.
Thank you for the kind words however I did not do the work for this I only for the used it as a reference to describe the situation.
I am glad it helped,
All the best,
Thomas
-
Very descriptive answer. Love that you describe your entire experiment.
Thank you for this extra bit of information. -
affect SERPs the 303 redirect remains fairly unknown because it is rarely used.
I came across a website linking to one of my sites with a 303 but I could not find a definitive answer of whether or not this link passed any PageRank. Information online about this was scarce and the only information I found was from people saying that only 301 redirects pass PageRank.
When I checked the status code for 303 redirect at w3.org it was “See other” . The description reads as follows:
“The new URI is not a substitute reference for the originally requested resource. The 303 response MUST NOT be cached, but the response to the second (redirected) request might be cacheable.”
This sounds very black and white and I my initial guess was that Google does not flow PR for 303 redirects. But I was curious, how was Google treating 303 redirects?
I set up an experiment to check how Google was handling the 303. Results below:
*Note: The translation for this keyword is NSFW
Google will show the search result with the URI that is initially requested. It will then show the Page Title and Meta Description (or other descriptive snippet) for the redirected page but it will show the URI from the redirecting page. It is caching the text from the final page but assigning it to the requested page.
How Google caches 303 redirects
Page A 303 redirects to Page B
Title: Page B
URI: Page A
Meta Description: Page B
Since page B does not rank for this keyword it is confirmed that the 303 redirect does not flow PR.
How did I set this test up?
- I chose a rare keyword that had very few pages ranking for it.
- On www.a.com I created two pages containing the keyword with the same exact content (www.a.com/a.htm .com/b.htm)
- One page (www.a.com/a.htm) was linked to internally multiple times
- One page (www.a.com/b.htm) was linked to externally with 303 redirects only from two domains (including www.marketingchip.com)
- The 303 redirects were created on the external pages (www.marketingchip.com/special-doors.html -> 303 -> www.a.com/b.htm)
After a few days neither www.a.com/a.htm nor www.a.com/b.htm appear in the results. However the number one listing for this keyword was forwww.marketingchip.com/special-doors.html but the meta title and the meta description are taken from www.a.com/b.htm. I acquired the information from this URL and would agree with Wesley definitely 301 redirect the link to not use a 303 and less you are trying to accomplish something similar to what it's shown above or in Wesley's comment. http://www.marketingchip.com/seo-experiments/how-does-a-303-redirect-affect-seo/ Sincerely, Thomas
-
A 303 won't send 'link juice' that means that all the value you website gets on mywebsite.com won't be send to mywebsite.com/fr/. You should use a 301 instead.
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
-
Redirect Issue - Drop in ranking after CMS change
Hi Website - https://www.aasprint.com.au/ After we moved the site from wordpress to codeIgniter + angular there has been a huge drop in traffic and ranking. One of the thing we recently realized is the redirection - COULD THAT BE THE ISSUE? On the browser and sitemap the URL doesn't have "/" at the end When checked on redirection tool the URL seems to be redirecting to one with "/" at the end Attached are the screenshots. Also moz bar shows no redirection. However, the issue seems to be flagged by the site audit tool as 301 redirection. Not sure if it's the cause for the drop. What action to take? Any advice would be much appreciated. V7CNtqt j3dJ4TW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bhisshaun0 -
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
Redirected Old Pages Still Indexed
Hello, we migrated a domain onto a new Wordpress site over a year ago. We redirected (with plugin: simple 301 redirects) all the old urls (.asp) to the corresponding new wordpress urls (non-.asp). The old pages are still indexed by Google, even though when you click on them you are redirected to the new page. Can someone tell me reasons they would still be indexed? Do you think it is hurting my rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0 -
Several 301 Redirects to Same Page
Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,0 -
301 or 302 Redirects to Mobile Site
When it's detected that a mobile device is accessing the site it has the ability to redirect from www.example.com to m.example.com. Does it make more sense to employ a 301 or 302 redirect here? Google says a 301 but does not explain why (although usually I stick to "when in doubt, 301") . It seems like a 302 would prevent passing link juice to the mobile site and having mobile-optimized results also showing up in Google's index. What is the preference here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTGT0 -
How to stop Google crawling after 301 redirect?
I have removed all pages from my old website and set 301 redirect to new website. But, I have verified old website with Google webmaster tools' HTML verification file which enable me to track all data and existence of pages in Google search for my old website. I was assumed that, Google will stop crawling and DE-indexed all pages after 301 redirect. Because, I have set 301 redirect before 3 months. Now, I'm able to see Google bot activity on my website with help of Google webmaster tools. You can find out attachment to know more about it. How can it possible & How Google can crawl removed pages? You can see following image to know more about it. First & Second
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
GeoIP - Redirect all but target country
My client would like to redirect all non UK traffic from their UK site to their main group site. I am intending to use a .htaccess redirect, like this: RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} !^GB$
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.group.com$1 [R,L] I have tested the redirect at it works fine. My question is if I put this in place would it have any negative SEO impact on the UK site?0 -
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0