301 vs 302
-
We recently launched a redesign and I noticed from running a crawl using Screaming Frog SEO that our redirects are all being seen as 302. I know 302 is a temporary redirect, but does this hurt SEO rankings when all our redirects are being seen as 302s instead of 301s?
Also, the way I implemented the redirects was by using the IIS Manager Tool. Is it possible that our IIS Manager Tool is not configured properly and instead of adding the redirect as 301, it is inserting it into the rewrite file as 302s?
-
Good to know!
-
302 is temporary. Its possible that the IIS Manager tool is not configured or check command to make it 301
All the best !
-
I'm in complete agreement that a 301 instead of a 302 is the best practice here, but wanted to point out that 302s do not necessarily pass no page rank at all. Check out this test study by Geoff Kenyon which dispels the theory that 302 pass no page rank at all, but clearly 301 is preferable in most cases.
-
A 302 is a temporary redirect. A good use of a 302 is when you have a form submission and want to redirect from the processing page. A 302 does not flow any page rank.
A 301 is a permanent redirect. Search engines obey this directive that page1.html is now page2.html. It will not only de-index page1.html but move most of the rank page1.html had over to page2.html.
If you're using IIS7 or later you should be able to easily add a 301.
-
All redirects should be a 301 in order to pass link benifits of the legacy page. You will still lose some link juice through a 301 but a 302 shall not pass benefits heres another thread on this topic.
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
-
Put a 301 from /main to home page, now I'm panicking
Hi, Our website is 10 years old, but I only noticed last night we had a https://curveball-media.co.uk/main page which has some badly formatted copy on. I redirected (301) to the home page https://curveball-media.co.uk/ Then I had a slight panic that maybe this was the wrong thing to do and it should be like it was with the home page and the /main page. Should I have left it or did I do the right thing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | curveballmedia0 -
404 vs 410 Across Search Engines
We are removing a large number of URLs permanently. We care about rankings for search engines other than Google such as Yahoo-Bing, who don't even list https status 410 code option: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/spatial-data-services/status-codes-and-error-handling Does anyone know how search engines other than Google handle 410 vs 404 status? For pages permanently being removed John Mueller at Google has stated "From our point of view, in the mid term/long term, a 404 is the same as a 410 for us. So in both of these cases, we drop those URLs from our index. We generally reduce crawling a little bit of those URLs so that we don’t spend too much time crawling things that we know don’t exist. The subtle difference here is that a 410 will sometimes fall out a little bit faster than a 404. But usually, we’re talking on the order of a couple days or so. So if you’re just removing content naturally, then that’s perfectly fine to use either one." Any information or thoughts? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sb10300 -
Absolute vs. Relative Canonical Links
Hi Moz Community, I have a client using relative links for their canonicals (vs. absolute) Google appears to be following this just fine, but bing, etc. are still sending organic traffic to the non-canonical links. It's a drupal setup. Anyone have advice? Should I recommend that all canonical links be absolute? They are strapped for resources, so this would be a PITA if it won't make a difference. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpleSearch1 -
P.O Box VS. Actual Address
We have a website (http://www.delivertech.ca) that uses a P.O Box number versus an actual address as their "location". Does this affect SEO? Is it better to use an actual address? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Web3Marketing870 -
301's & Link Juice
So lets say we have a site that has 0 page rank (kind of new) has few incoming links, nothing significant compared to the other sites. Now from what I understand link juice flows throughout the site. So, this site is a news site, and writes sports previews and predictions and what not. After a while, a game from 2 months gets 0 hits, 0 search queries, nobody cares. Wouldn't it make sense to take that type of expired content and have it 301 to a different page. That way the more relevant content gets the juice, thus giving it a better ranking... Just wondering what everybody's thought its on this link juice thing, and what am i missing..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ravashjalil0 -
Htaccess 301 regex question
I need some help with a regex for htaccess. I want to 301 redirect this: http://olddomain.com/oldsubdir/fruit.aspx to this: https://www.newdomain.com/newsubdir/FRUIT changes: different protocol (http -> https) add 'www.' different domain (olddomain and newdomain are constants) different subdirectory (oldsubdir and newsubdir are constants) 'fruit' is a variable (which will contain only letters [a-zA-Z]) is it possible to make 'fruit' UPPER case on the redirect (so 'fruit' -> 'FRUIT') remove '.aspx' I think it's something like this (placed in the .htaccess file in the root directory of olddomain): RedirectMatch 301 /oldsubdir/(.*).aspx https://www.newdomain.com/newsubdir/$1 Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | scanlin0 -
301 Redirect Dilemma - Website redesign
Hi Guys, We are redesigning a clients ecommerce site. As part of the process, we're changing the URL structure to make it more friendly. I have put together a provisional 301 redirect plan but I'm not sure just how far I need to go with it. So far I have extract all the pages from the existing site that Google Webmaster Tools says have links pointing at them - this totals 93 pages. I have matched each page like for like to the new website structure. My next step was to pull the landing pages report from Google Analytics, I have extracted the pages that received entrances over the last 6 weeks. This totals 553, less the redirects I have already done and cleaning up some Google Translate pages I have circa 410 pages left. Many of these pages has more than 1 URL pointing to that page. I'm debating how important it is that that all of these remaining 410 pages have individual redirects set up for them one by one. I have to rule out regex because there is no pattern that makes sense given that I have already set up redirects for the first 93 pages that have external links. My question therefore is how important are 301 redirects on pages that have no external links and receive less than 10 entrances over a 6 week previous period? Do I need to 301 every single product on the old site to it's corresponding page on the new site? Also, I'm not sure how to treat pages that have mutliple URL's on the old site, the existing URL structure is such a mess that in some instances I have 5 URL's for one product page? I could feasibly create 5 seperate redirects but is this necessary? Also what about speed considerations, the server is going to have to load these redirects and it may slow the site down. I'm sitting at 100 odd so far. Any answers are most appreciated. Thanks Derek.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseo0 -
Does 302 pass link juice?
Hi! We have our content under two subdomains, one for the English language and one for Spanish. Depending on the language of the browser, there's a 302 redirecting to one of this subdomains. However, our main domain (which has no content) is receiving a lot of links - people rather link to mydomain.com than to en.mydomain.com. Does the 302 passing any link juice? If so, to which subdomain? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bodaclick0