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
-
301 Redirect in breadcrumb. How bad is it?
Hi all, How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects? We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb. SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404. However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months. could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
Problem with redirects in coldfusion
How to redirect pages in cold fusion? If using ColdFusion and modrewrite, the URL will never be redirected from ModRewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexkatalkin0 -
How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?
Hi All, In order to avoid duplication errors we've decided to redirect old categories (merge some categories).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
In the past we have been very generous with the number of categories we assigned each post. One category needs to be redirected back to blog home (removed completely) while a couple others should be merged. Afterwords we will re-categorize some of the old posts. What is the proper way to do so?
We are not technical, Is there a plugin that can assist? Thanks0 -
Redirecting one site to another for link juice
I have two sites with same theme - buying cars. I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bestone0 -
Is 301 redirect suggested on pagination pages
Hi - Due to pagination the default page of site is coming in 2 url with - ?page=1/ sub-url and /sub-url is 301 a recommended solution due to this pagination urls Also - is it required to create separate title and meta description of every pagination page We are taking specifically in context of our discounts and offer section http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_offers&view=list&Itemid=9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Changing a parent category and 301 redirecting
I have a set of three pages that are subpages of a parent. The structure is as follows: mysite.com/directory/personal-widgets mysite.com/directory/commercial-widgets mysite.com/directory/widgets-services The partent page name "directory" really isn't working for where I want these pages to evolve. So I want to change it to "guides" In a world without worrying about google, I would simply change the parent page to guides, so they look like this, and be done with it: mysite.com/guides/personal-widgets But, the obvious problem is that I have external links to the page now. And the pages have a nice PR. And they also have Facebook page Likes and I don't know if I'll lose those. I know that if I should do this I should redirect the pages to the new pages of course. My question is: Will redirecting the old URL to the new URL with a 301 cause anything negative to happen that I might not be expecting? Does Google dislike Redirects for any reason, or understand they are sometimes necessary?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
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$1 [R,L] I have tested the redirect at it works fine. My question is if I put this in place would it have any negative SEO impact on the UK site?0 -
Htaccess Redirect with %C2%A0 in URL
Below is my setup for redirects in .htaccess file in my root word press installation. The www to non-www works well, so no problems there Other page redirects work well, too (example: redirect 301 /some-page/ http://mysite.com/another-page/ (I didn't post those because I have a few too many : ) So here it goes... RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pepsimoz
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L] BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress redirect 301 /archives/10-college- majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%20majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ I'm having a problem with the last 301 redirect: redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ not working... As you can see I've tried using other varations of the "space" but no go. I also used a redirect in cPanel's Redirect screen; testing all the possible options + wildcard I've also tried this: http://serverfault.com/questions/201829/using-special-characters-in-apache-mod-rewrite-rule (perhaps unsuccessfully, because it caused a 500 server error and it's a different situation in my case) I also saw something here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3908682.htm but I don't know if it works and how I would implement that + do so without compromising ALL other redirects. Note: the URL displays with a space in the address bar of all major web browsers: http://mysite.com/10-college- majors/ and goes to a 404 page I have a goregous page / PR6 / high authority site linking to the URL on my site, but they copied the URL with a space somehow. I contacted the person responsible for the website and he claims it works fine (aka he didn't check it). Is there a clean way to redirect ONLY this problematic URL without compromising other redirects, etc? Any ideas would be great. I'll respond with progress. Thanks in advance. UPDATE the redirect works, and it did work. Even so, when looking at source of page linking to mine, the URL looks like this: ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college- majors/ Clicking the URL in Source View in FireFox takes me to ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ none of my 301 redirects should direct there. I don't have any redirect plugins either.0