301 vs 302 redirect
-
Hello Mozers,
I have a website which offers subscriptions on a monthly basis, when one profile expires the link of the profile gets a 301 redirect to the main category, just that if the member chooses to come back after a while he can reactivate the profile and the link will work again and the 301 will disappear,
Should I be doing 302 redirect, as from this point of view it's only a temporarily redirect ?
Thanks in advance
-
I would use a 301.
Reason #1 - Some of those profiles are going to have external links, as Robert stated in his reply.
Reason #2 - A 302 will not remove the URL from the index like a 301 will. Over time you could end up with many more temporary redirects than actual pages, which may look pretty bad. I prefer not to bloat the index with URLs like that.
In the event that someone comes back you can remove the 301 redirect with no ill-effect. If it has been in place for a long time (e.g. a year or more) the profile page may not get its pagerank back from those older links, which would be fine.
Please also keep in mind that Google can choose to treat a 301 like a 404 if the content doesn't match up. This could easily happen with the situation you mention above. However, I don't really think there is any other option other than doing the 302. I'd rather let it be treated as a 404 than a 302 if we're talking about user-generated pages here because they can get out of hand and bloat the index over time.
eCommerce sites that have products coming and going all the time have similar issues. Imagine if every product a store ever sold stayed indexed for years after the product was no longer available. Even if users are redirected I don't think this is an ideal situation.
-
Hello Yiannis,
Thanks for the response, I think this is the right way, as the profiles are erased after 6 month of inactivity ... never thought of it this way
-
Hello Chris, sorry for the lack of details, so the link caries value on each profile, there are inbound links coming to each profile from our social profiles from shares tweets pins and so on, so each profile carries a link weight but the way we structure the website : thewebsite/city/profile-name , and when the subscription expires it redirects from /city/profile-name to /city, so all the link juice will be carried to the city in question, as for the frequency it depends, we have profile being reactivated after 1 week or after 2-3 month ...
-
Ionut, what specifically does the link go to and from originally and how often do members come back?
-
Hello Ionut,
Since they are subscription profiles (and thus there isnt a link value concern) a 302 might be a better option at start.
The way I would do it is set a rule of permanent user expiration and say once someone does not renew for lets say 6 months or 1 year then I make a permanent 301, until then I leave it as a 302. The length of the month may vary but that's something your analytics will tell you.
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
-
Subdir vs Subdomain vs ccTLD
Hello Community, I'm running a .com website with India targetted audience on Webmastertools from 2 years. Now I want to start a separate zone for US. .us domain is not available for my domain right now. So what is your suggestion for best results: 1. domain/us (Subdirectory) 2. us.domain (Subdomain) 3. new domain (separate website) I think Subdomain can work great if I will pass place a header link sitewide. Or that can reduce authority as mentioned on few blogs? Let me know your thoughts
On-Page Optimization | | sah900 -
301 and the base URL
Hi, please bear with me as I'm pretty new to all this! I've my base URL but obviously want to add keywords to it for seo purposes. Should I redirect from the base URL to the URL with the keywords appended? So my landing page goes from say www.moz.com to www.moz.com/keywords-here. If I do that, should I replicate all the meta data (descriptions etc) on the original landing page? Or does it not matter? Thanks, Nick
On-Page Optimization | | nickwoodward0 -
Using keywords in my URL: Doing a redirect to /keyword
My website in "On Page Grade" received an A.Anyway, I only have 1 thing to optimize:_"Use Keywords in your URL__Using your targeted keywords in the URL string adds relevancy to your page for search engine rankings, assists potential visitors identify the topic of your page from the URL, and provides SEO value when used as the anchor text of referring links."_My website is ranking in top10 for a super high competitive keyword and all my others competitors have the keyword on their domain, but not for my URL.Since I can't change my domain for fixing this suggestion, I would like to know what do you think about doing a 301 redirect from / to mydomainname.com/keyword/So the index of my website would be the /keyword.I don't know if this can make a damage to my SERP for the big change ir it would be a great choice.
On-Page Optimization | | estebanseo0 -
Temporary redirections
Hi all, after crawling my website the SEOMOZ software has warned me about temporary redirections like these: What should I do? What consequences could it have in the SERPSs? Thanks. http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/campamento-bilingue-para-ninos/
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/campamento-bilingue-para-ninos/
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/error-404 http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/campamento-de-kitesurf/
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/campamento-de-kitesurf/
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/error-404/ http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/condiciones-generales/www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/condiciones-generales/www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/error-404/ http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/en/about-tks/www.giselapulidoprocenter.com
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/en/about-tks/www.giselapulidoprocenter.com
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/en/page-not-found/ http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/gisela-pulido-escuela/www.giselapulidoprocenter.com
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/gisela-pulido-escuela/www.giselapulidoprocenter.com
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/error-404/ http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ENCLAVE_3.jpg
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ENCLAVE_3.jpg
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/error-404/ http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/MATERIAL_KITE_3.jpg
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/MATERIAL_KITE_3.jpg
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/error-404/ http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/campamento-kitesurf-orca.jpg
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/campamento-kitesurf-orca.jpg
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/error-404/ http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/expertos2.jpg
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/expertos2.jpg
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/error-404/ http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/gisela.jpg
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/gisela.jpg
http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/error-404/0 -
Internal Links: Navigation Bar vs. Body Text
Hello. I have a page on our site that is especially popular and has many inbound links. This page has the same site navigation buttons (at the top) as every other page on the site. Do these site navigation buttons pass along link juice to other pages in the same way that an internal link would elsewhere on the page? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
301 Problem
Hi Guys, Just have a small problem with a htaccess 301 redirect. I would like to 301: www.old-domain.com & old-domain.com to www.new-domain.com. The site is exactly the same with the same directory structure so i would also like all the subpages to work. Eg: www.old-domain.com/folder/page & old-domain.com/folder/page to www.new-domain.com/folder/page Many thanks
On-Page Optimization | | MSSTORAGE0 -
How much juice do you lose in a 301 redirect?
Our site has a number of, shall we say, unoptimized URLs. I would like to change the URLs to be more relevant; if a page is about red widgets, the URL should be www.domain.com/red-widgets.html, right? I'm getting resistance on this, however, based on the belief that you lose something significant when you 301 an old URL to a new one. Now, I know that if you have a long chain of redirects, the spiders will stop following at some point, and that is a huge problem. That wouldn't apply if there's only one step in the chain, however. I've also heard that you lose some link juice in a 301, but I'm unsure how serious that problem actually is. Is it small enough that we'd win out in the long run with better-optimized URLs?
On-Page Optimization | | CMC-SD0 -
Image alt attribute vs. plain text in link?
I'm building a product category browsing page for a high-falutin' jewelry retailer where we display only product photos linking to individual product pages, without any text in the links. From an SEO and link-juice-passing perspective, is it most effective to embed the product titles as the alt attribute in each image, or to leave alt="" and use text substitutions (i.e. an inner which is css'd to display: none) within the <a>to help search engines accept my product titles as the link text with the most credibility?</a>
On-Page Optimization | | cadenzajon0