Temporary Redirect Notice regarding Wordpress

[AndreaKayal]

Hello,

Under the warnings in Moz, we have 44 temporary redirect warnings showing up because we moved our blog from timelinkblogs.wordpress.org to our subdomain blog.timelink.org within Wordpress.  Wordpress indicates that these were permanent 301 redirects, but Moz is indicating that they are temporary.

We want to be sure that they are permanent so we retain the SEO credit.  Can someone please confirm that these are permanent redirects i.e.

http://blog.timelink.com/2012/02/17/true-stories-time-and-attendance-pay-rules-2

Moz is showing the following- it has a "trackback" added to the URL?

http://blog.timelink.com/2012/02/17/true-stories-time-and-attendance-pay-rules-2/trackback/

Thanks!

[MikeRoberts]

In the case of the wordpress trackback issue... its basically self-referential. Because their is a link to your blog post on your blog, wordpress creates a trackback to notify you their is a link to your blog post on a blog. Normally the reason for this is to notify you of when someone else on a blog posts a link to your site or posts on one of their posts. I.E. a Pingback or a trackback. 302s may not pass link equity but the trackback won't pass as much as the link that the trackback is notifying you of in the first place.

So ultimately, don't worry about the trackback 302s if you can't change the wp-trackback.php file. Its an easy fix if you can access the file but otherwise the seo benefit in this particular case is neglible.

Your old blog URLs 302ing is an issue though. Have you double-checked with the SEOBook tool that your URLs are redirecting improperly or is it just the trackbacks that you're being warned about?

[AndreaKayal]

Thank you, Mike.  But my concern is the following per Moz:

Using HTTP header refreshes, 302, 303 or 307 redirects will cause search engine crawlers to treat the redirect as temporary and not pass any link juice (ranking power). We highly recommend that you replace temporary redirects with 301 redirects.

I worry that the blog posts are not passing SEO link juice.

[MikeRoberts]

Not sure how I wound up slapping a .ORG onto your URL like that... could've sworn I was copy/pasting everything correctly. Either way, that tool will help you double-check you have the correct HTTP status codes showing for your URLs.

As for the not being able to change that trackback file, don't worry about them then. They won't hurt you by 302ing.

[AndreaKayal]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the quick response!  And I appreciate the link to that tool.  Literally all 44 of our blogs from the following are showing up with these errors- http://blog.timelink.com/

We are on Wordpress.com not .org so I am not sure I can manipulate that file.

[MikeRoberts]

Using the SeoBook server header tool (link), timelinkblogs.wordpress.org is showing that it 302 redirects to Wordpress.org instead of your new site. Do you have any other URLs we can check to see if they're redirecting properly?

As for Trackbacks showing as 302s, that often arises from using the Disqus commenting system. Take a look in your wp-trackback.php file for the line wp_redirect(get_permalink(``$tb_id``)); and change it to wp_redirect(get_permalink(``$tb_id``),301); in order to make all those trackback 302s into 301s.