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.
Language Detection redirect: 301 or 302?
-
We have a site offering a voip app in 4 languages. Users are currently 302 redirected from the root page to /language subpages, depending on their browser language.
Discussions about the sense of this aside: Is it correct to use a 302 redirect here or should users be 301 redirected to their respective languages? I don't find any guideline on this whatsoever...
-
My pleasure!
-
Hi Marcus
Thanks for your great answer! This makes a lot of sense and I agree that 303 seems to be the suitable response if they were used "semantically"...
I do not agree with the general setup they made with this user detection (particularly since the root URL is not accessible but gets redirected). So I'm just out for a quick fix here for something that is not set up optimally in general.
I think I will stick with the 302 - it's not so easy to decide, but in such cases I think what Google itself does is a good reference. So thanks for pointing that out!
We won't get link juice from the domain's root using 302s (or less), but I will try to solve this otherwise by actually making that URL accessible.
Thanks a lot!
-
Hey Philipp
Okay, SEO aside here and assuming folks are landing on your site and not on the section of the site that is targeted to their location / language (which is a whole other discussion but not your question as far as I can tell) then you want to redirect these users to the correct language pages.
So, we have two options here:
- HTTP 301 - Moved Permanently: Now I don't feel this is correct. The resource has not moved, it is just not correct for this user based on their language preference.
- HTTP 302 - Found: This is used to indicate the resource has temporarily moved to another location so is maybe more suitable as results from page A will not be completely ignored
In fact, if you dig into the HTTP status codes documentation a better option here would seemingly be a 303 which is classified as 'The response to the request can be found under another URI' and for my money that is more suitable. But, problem is, no one seems to use the 303 redirect and everyone seems to use the 302 in it's place.
So, I ask myself, what does Google do? When I visit www.google.com from the UK I am always redirected to the www.google.co.uk site. Is this a 301, 302, 303 or something else entirely? So, I checked quickly in webbug (or you can do it Chrome by looking at the Network tab in Tools > Developer Tools > Network Tab) and it redirects with a 302 status code.
Request: HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
Connection: close
Accept: /
User-Agent: WebBug/5.0Response: HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.google.co.uk/So, I am not sure there is a definitive answer as from a search engine perspective we would want to folks landing on the right page due to our geo location and language targeting but that does not escape the need to show people the content in the correct language.
If this was me and I was dead set on a redirection I would go with a 302. I can't claim that is an authoritative answer but it is certainly my opinion based on my research here.
I guess the alternative would be to maybe detect the users language settings and load a pop up that then allows them to select and redirect so it is not done at the request / response level but rather a choice the user makes themselves (then maybe cookies or other options could be used to deal with language for those users on subsequent visits). In the UK http://www.babycenter.com/ does this and it pops up asking me which version of the site I would like to visit (choice is always a good thing).
Possibly a good question to ask in the Google Webmaster Help Forum: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters as you will often get a Googler pop up to answer specific questions or this question may well have been asked before (albeit in a different way). If this is not search focused then really it comes down to what you think works best for your users.
Hope that helps!
MarcusSome further reading if it helps:
- http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192
- http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399
- http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_302
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
-
We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version?
We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version? Thant way all forms of the website are pointing to one version?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Is there any benefit to changing 303 redirects to 301?
A year ago I moved my marketplace website from http to https. I implemented some design changes at the same time, and saw a huge drop in traffic that we have not recovered from. I've been searching for reasons for the organic traffic decline and have noticed that the redirects from http to https URLs are 303 redirects. There's little information available about 303 redirects but most articles say they don't pass link juice. Is it worth changing them to 301 redirects now? Are there risks in making such a change a year later, and is it likely to have any benefits for rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAdeit0 -
Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO
I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts? Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Hacked website - Dealing with 301 redirects and a large .htaccess file
One of my client's websites was recently hacked and I've been dealing with the after effects of it. The website is now clean of malware and I already appealed to Google about the malware issue. The current issue I have is dealing with the 20, 000+ crawl errors which are garbage links that were created from the hacking. How does one go about dealing with all the 301 redirects I need to create for all the 404 crawl errors? I'm already noticing an increased load time on the website due to having a rather large .htaccess file with a couple thousand 301 redirects done already which I fear will result in my client's website performance and SEO performance taking a hit as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK0 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
Should I run 302 first before implementing 301?
I just want to ask if it is necessary to run 302 redirections first before redirecting old to new URLs permanently. I heard that we should run temporary redirects first so we can check after and to avoid passing the link juice but I want to hear thoughts from experts. Do i need to test 302s for old pages that are still live or should we redirect old URLs once these pages already removed from the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow20130 -
Can I make 301 redirects on a Windows server (without access to IIS)?
Hey everyone, I've been trying to figure out a way to set up some 301 redirects to handle the broken links left behind after a site restructuring, but I can only ever find information on 2 methods that I can't use (as far as I can tell). The first method is to do some stuff with an htaccess file, but that looks like it only works on Linux-based servers. The method described for Windows servers is generally to install this IIS rewrite/redirect module and run that, but I don't think our web hosting company allows users to log directly into the server, so I wouldn't be able to use the IIS thing. Is there any other way to get a 301 redirect set up? And is this uncommon for a web hosting company to do, or do you all just run your sites on Linux-based servers or your own Windows machines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrianAlpert780 -
Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?
I have a well established domain that's been hit with some penalties. It hasn't been nuked off the map, just downgraded, especially on short-tail, one word type queries. I'm planning on redirecting this domain to another well established domain. The domains already have a history of lots of interlinking and are very similar from a subject matter standpoint. I feel that the penalized domain has been hit with an "over-optimization" of link anchor text penalty (I'm hoping it's algorithmic, but it could be manual). My question is if anyone has ever heard of a penalty like this being transferred to another domain through a 301 redirect. My hope is that the penalty just puts a cap on how much juice the redirect can pass, rather than transferring the penalty to the other domain itself. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOMG1