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.
Does a 302 redirect pass penalties?
-
I'm having problems finding a definitive answer to this question, there is a lot of rumour and gossip out there but nothing I can rely on.
I'm working with a site that received an unnatural links notice followed by a massive drop in search traffic. Looking at the link profile it's pretty much jacked beyond repair and I have recommended that we move over to a fresh domain.
However, it's an established brand with many more sources of traffic than organic search. There's no way we can burn all their repeat visits, loyal customers, brand recognition that they've built up over the years so I want to redirect from the old domain to the new. This is not to try and make any SEO gain from the previous site, frankly we don't give a crap about that. We just want to maintain the brand.
A 302 is a temporary redirect, this will be a permanent move BUT a 301 will pass on the penalty. So can we safely use a 302 redirect in this situation or is there a better alternative (meta refresh?)
Thanks for your help!
MB.
-
Cheers Chris. Something like that would be a good fallback plan, but in our case the referral and direct traffic is way more important than organic search.
In the absence of any better solution and because we can't ditch the brand and all the non-SEO traffic we've decided to go down the cleanup route. Even if it doesn't work it's better than sacrificing the referral and direct traffic the brand gets. Sucks that there seems to be no better solution to this problem, it seems like a common issue.
-
I assume you have already considered this but a more sure way to keep the continuity (most) of traffic without passing the penalty would be to set individual landing pages on the old domain (for each important URL) with a notice about the new site and a large no follow link to forward to tcorrelating page on the new domain. You would need to create a lot of pages but it is a solution, albeit one with a poor user experience so it's probably a last resort (better than a 404).
I have a client caught in an algorithmic penalty and am searching these same sources for answers. It seems that sometimes a 301 can avert the penalty but ussually does not. Were gonna try it, if it doesn't work we might be exactly where your client is now looking at a new clean domain and 302's (maybe).
Good Luck!
-
I would still love to know if anyone has any more concrete information on this question. At the moment it seems like people like my client find themselves in an intractable problem:
-
Recovering is highly unlikely, so it's often easier to save the brand and move to a new domain
-
But doing so means you have to relinquish all your previous brand recognition and loyalty (NOT your old site's SEO) because using a 301 OR a 302 redirect will pass along the penalty
So is there no way of redirecting a domain that will not pass any SEO value and/or the penalty? If you don't care about the old site's SEO status or links and you just want to start anew, is it also impossible to retain the branded traffic & repeat visitors from the old site?
-
-
Can you share some of the information that led you to that conclusion?
-
Hi Matthew,
I had assumed that you were trying to wipe the slate clean. However because you were talking about redirecting links from any source at all. I assume that you would be trying to 302 redirect a link for me what was once bad source to a now clean slate or new source. My history of helping people with this and knowledge personally on the subject tells me do not do it I would strongly advise against doing it. However there is an SCO company you may feel more comfortable in speaking with that will give you the same definite answer.
I would try the guys atDistilled, or Virantehttp://www.virante.org/Virante is a Company that is endorsed by Moz & The reason I'm speaking about them is they make a tool called http://www.removeem.com/They deal quite a bit with penalties and link removal. So not that you are looking to remove links however they would give you a very definite yes or no and from what I've experienced myself it is not really wiping the slate clean and less you truly are wiping the slate clean and that means having webmasters that have valid links not the ones that got you in trouble obviously asked for them to change the link so that it is still link to you if they'll actually do it. There's no way you're going to retain your ranking from this you're going to have to start from scratch and do some RCS.Sorry if my answer was not clear enough. Respectfully, Thomas
-
Thanks Greg,
I had seen that previous discussion, it's pretty much the most useful content I could find on the subject. Except it's well over 12 months old, and it pretty clearly establishes that 301 redirects do pass penalties immediately.
Given we're moving the site to escape a penalty it would be crazy to use a 301 redirect when we know that is going to pass on the penalty.
My question is whether a 302 redirect will pass a penalty. In theory it shouldn't because it doesn't pass PageRank or other SEO metrics, so would it pass a penalty?
It's nuts that there's no more definitive information on something that should be so easy to test and answer. Is there no advice from Moz or any of the other authorities on this?
-
Hi Mathew,
There was an interesting discussion on this subject on another question thread here
There was no definite yes or no to your question, some people experienced the penalty being passed over and others didn't. In theory, if 301's passed penalty, webmasters could 301 all their "dead" sites to competitors and this would be a mission for Google to control should the 301 pass over the penalty.
Based on Rands comments in that thread, he believes 301's dont pass on any penalties and it may be due to other factors that contribute to the low rankings on the new sites since implementing the 301.
My suggestion would be to go ahead and do the permanent redirect. As you say, you cant afford loosing return customers. Let us know how it goes.
Greg
-
Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion Thomas, but respectfully it looks like you misinterpreted my question. I'm very clear that we're not trying to do this to benefit from any old spam links - we're doing this to wipe the slate clean on all that. But this is a brand we're talking about - people reach the site from all sorts of sources, referrals & reviews, WoM, repeat/loyal visitors, etc.
We don't give a damn about the negligible SEO value of the old site but we care very much about not losing our non-organic search visitors as they're all that's sustaining the business right now.
So if it's true that both 301 and 302 redirects pass on a penalty that means that Google is screwing with us even when we're trying to wipe the slate clean. That's just insane even by their standards - now they're trying to penalise people beyond the realm of organic search!
But does anyone have any incontrovertible proof that this is the case? Have Moz or any other authorities done any experiments on this?
-
hi,
I can tell you with absolute certainty if you have set up 302's out of what was your old website and Google checks that which they will because you said there Penalizing you.
"I'm working with a site that received an unnatural links notice followed by a massive drop in search traffic. Looking at the link profile it's pretty much jacked beyond repair and I have recommended that we move over to a fresh domain."
I would unfortunately have to recommend strongly that you if moving to note new domain literally begin again. If of course you have relevant links from high quality sources yes those can be 301 redirected.
If you think that Google will let you simply 302 bad links to your new site you are going to be in for a very tough time with Google.
It's extremely important to follow the rules and not to try to manipulate them in any way shape or form if they feel that you are trying to benefit from what they think is spam to put it nicely they will come down on you much harder. I know it's not the answer you want to hear. However,I know for a fact you should not do that and if you do you will simply be penalized again.
Recommend using open web explore along with majestic SEO to find the relevant back links and see if there's a way to salvage some of them. Through webmasters changing the quality links. Most likely white hat webmasters are likely to respond and be more friendly than black hat webmasters. Though I know I'm not telling you anything new everyone's unique.
I wish you the best on this sincerely,
Thomas
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
-
Google Penalty Checker Tool
What is the best tool to check for the google penalty, What penalty hit the website. ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
301 Redirect Showing Up as Thousands Of Backlinks?
Hi Everyone, I'm currently doing quite a large back link audit on my company's website and there's one thing that's bugging me. Our website used to be split into two domains for separate areas of the business but since we have merged them together into one domain and have 301 redirected the old domain the the main one. But now, both GWT and Majestic are telling me that I've got 12,000 backlinks from that domain? This domain didn't even have 12,000 pages when it was live and I only did specific 301 redirects (ie. for specific URL's and not an overall domain level 301 redirect) for about 50 of the URL's with all the rest being redirected to the homepage. Therefore I'm quite confused about why its showing up as so many backlinks - Old redirects I've done don't usually show as a backlink at all. UPDATE: I've got some more info on the specific back links. But now my question is - is having this many backlinks/redirects from a single domain going to be viewed negatively in Google's eyes? I'm currently doing a reconsideration request and would look to try and fix this issue if having so many backlinks from a single domain would be against Google's guidelines. Does anybody have any ideas? Probably somthing very obvious. Thanks! Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandicliffe0 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0 -
Primary Domain or Redirect?
We are starting a new travel guide for a resort town. I have bought an expired domain with decent related links and PR (which seems to have survived the transfer (4 months ago). Beofre we launch the new site I am trying to decide if we should use this expired domain as the primary URL for the new site or just do a permanent redirect and buy a new domain that better matches the theme of the site. I am obviously concerned with starting from scatch with a new domain. I am confident we can build some good rellevant links in a short time but this space is very competetive. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Locals0 -
Bing Penalty
I am working with a client who apparently has been penalized by Bing. The site has been around for many years and they are an industry leader in their field. The site was previously indexed and received a substantial amount of traffic from Bing. Last week the site disappeared from Bing's index. A site: and url: search both show no results. Does anyone have a significant amount of knowledge or experience related to Bing penalties? Here is what I have done so far: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/03/19/getting-out-of-the-penalty-box.aspx This 2009 article states Bing's Summary Tool offers a "Site Status" section with a "Blocked" indicator which informs webmasters if a site is penalized. I have seen it before a long time ago, but apparently the field no longer exists. Is there a definitive means of determining if Bing has manually penalized a site besides a response from their Content Inclusion Request? Danny Sullivan wrote a great article about how Bing removed some sites for thin content last month. It seems two of the sites which were a focus of the article have been re-included in Bing's index. Bing claims an algorithm change where Danny seems skeptical. Either way this could be the same issue. http://searchengineland.com/bing-bans-holiday-deals-sites-102856 there are two recent complaints on Bing's forums about a similar issue where various webmasters shared their sites have been removed. There are no responses to these posts from Bing: http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/p/670360/9665163.aspx#9665163 and http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/t/670550.aspx?PageIndex=1 (the comments are relevant but not the initial post). Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0 -
Cookies and redirects - what are the negative effects?
I am advising a client who wants to streamline their online customers experience through the use of cookies. The first time someone visits mysite.com, they will visit the normal index page, and on that page will be asked to identify themselves as a Personal or Business customer - and taken through to a relevant page. This will result in a cookie being added. The next time they come back to mysite.com, the cookie will automatically direct them from the index page to mysite.com/personal/ or mysite.com/business/. My question is, what are the SEO implications of this, especially given the fact the index page is their primary landing page for almost all organic traffic? Bots I realise that googlebot etc do not store cookies, so this should result in no change from the bots perspective (i.e. no redirect) but is it that simple? In effect we'll be showing the bot one thing and second time + visitors something else. Is this not effectively cloaking? All advice gratefully received!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomasters0 -
How long is it safe to use a 302 redirect?
Hi All, Lets assume there is site A and site B, both sites are live on the internet today as standalone businesses, but they sell very similar products. Site B has built up some link equity and will eventually become the domain for site A due to an organisational re-brand. For the time being however site A will remain, but site B needs to disappear temporarily, but not lose the link equity which has been built up against it. My current thinking is to 302 redirect site B to site A such that users and search bots accessing site B will be redirected to site A whilst leaving the link equity that exists against site B fully intact and allowing us to continue to grow it should we wish to. The question is, does anybody have a view on how long it is safe to use a 302 temporary redirect for? i.e., is 8-10 months to long. Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BenRush0