Should you change Temporary redirects 302's to a 301 even if page is not important/intended for ranking ?
-
Hi
Whilst i appreciate its best practice to 301 redirect permanently moved pages, what if the page is say a login page or other page you not really interested in ranking or transferring juice to ? is it still important/best practice to do so simply because the page has permanently moved hence should still be a 301 even though you don't really want it to rank ?
cheers
dan
-
good info cheers
-
Exactly. If they are redirects because you need to login then a 302 is the way to go. If you use a 301 for those redirects, some browsers may cache that redirect and then when the user is actually logged in, he will still be redirected to the login page as the browser "thought" that page was no longer available (and that can potentially create an infinite loop)...
Over the years, I found 2 options to go about that:
- You want the pages indexed (those accessible after login in): Use 302, and give Google a way to crawl those pages.
- You don't want those pages to be indexed (personal info inside): Then you can (while the user is logged out) point the destination to those pages to the login page with a return path, example: http://www.domain.com/login?return=page-to-return, that way you avoid any 3XX redirect without loosing any pagerank in the process (going over any 3XX redirect looses some pagerank as if it was a regular link).
Hope that helped
-
Thanks for commenting Federico !
Could well be although i don't know for sure - Many of them are to a login page from an 'account/destination/forum' type of url so i presume thats whats happening, needing to redirect temporarily to login, in most of the instances where 302 re-directing to a login page, and hence 302 is correct usage in these instances ?
-
Hmm... are those 302 because you need to login to view that content? or you just removed the page?
If you completely removed the page, then a 301 would be the best option, even if you don't want the final destination to rank, as Simon said, they still accumulate pagerank and pass it to the other linked pages (which some could be of the ones to WANT to rank).
302 are temporary redirects, meaning that it's temporal, at that specific moment the page isn't available (because you need to login to view it, it is being updates, or whatever is the reason), but with a 302 you are basically telling search engines to index that page, but just come back later as specifically now it isn't available.
-
Choosing to leave a redirect as a 302 is not a major issue as it's not going to have any major effect other than, as you rightly say, preventing full flow of link juice to the new page. However, it is worth considering that while you may not wish to rank for this page you are unnecessarily wasting link juice, however minimal.
In theory, if you're not overly concerned about rank for this page you could noindex it. The page, although not indexed, would still accumulate page rank (if you changed to a 301) which you could pass internally to other pages in your site. A noindex page can still accumulate and pass pagerank as this old but still relevant article attests. Really though leaving the 302 in place is not going to be a problem if you decide the benefit of changing it would be minimal.
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
-
My Website's Home Page is Missing on Google SERP
Hi All, I have a WordPress website which has about 10-12 pages in total. When I search for the brand name on Google Search, the home page URL isn't appearing on the result pages while the rest of the pages are appearing. There're no issues with the canonicalization or meta titles/descriptions as such. What could possibly the reason behind this aberration? Looking forward to your advice! Cheers
Technical SEO | | ugorayan0 -
My website's pages are not being indexed correctly
Hi, One of our websites, which is actually a price comparison engine, facing indexing problem at Google. When we check “site:mywebsite.com “, there are lots of pages indexed which are not from mywebsite.com but from merchants websites. The index result page also shows merchant’s page title. In some cases the title is from merchant’s site but when the given link is accessed it points to mywebsite.com/index. Also the cache displays the merchant’s product page as the last indexed version rather than showing ours. The mywebsite.com has quite few Merchants that send us their product feed. Those products are listed on comparison page with prices. The merchant’s links on comparison page are all no-follow links but some of the (not all) merchant’s product pages are indexed against mywebsite.com as mentioned above instead of product comparison page of mywebsite.com How can we fix the issue? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digitalMSB0 -
302 to 301 redirect
Our site has quite a few 302 redirects that really ought to be 301's. Our IT department is really busy so the question is, given that the 302's have probably been in place for years, is it worth changing them to 301's now? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
Correct Redirect method for switching pages from .html to /pretty urls/
I have a customer that has all his site files as .html extensions and i'm going to rebuild this site into a wordpress site for easier management, regarding the new permalink structure, should i just do a 301 redirect on this?
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
Https-pages still in the SERP's
Hi all, my problem is the following: our CMS (self-developed) produces https-versions of our "normal" web pages, which means duplicate content. Our it-department put the <noindex,nofollow>on the https pages, that was like 6 weeks ago.</noindex,nofollow> I check the number of indexed pages once a week and still see a lot of these https pages in the Google index. I know that I may hit different data center and that these numbers aren't 100% valid, but still... sometimes the number of indexed https even moves up. Any ideas/suggestions? Wait for a longer time? Or take the time and go to Webmaster Tools to kick them out of the index? Another question: for a nice query, one https page ranks No. 1. If I kick the page out of the index, do you think that the http page replaces the No. 1 position? Or will the ranking be lost? (sends some nice traffic :-))... thanx in advance 😉
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
301 redirect or 302
A client of mine has an international company named www.taxglobalizers.com if you come from Holland they 302 redirect you to the www.taxglobalizers.com/en version of the site and if you come from Holland they redirect with a 302 to www.taxglobalizers.com/nl version. I think it is best to change this in a 301 redirect. Am i correct in this? Kind Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
301 redirect Issues
my clients site is www.greenbayharvest.co.uk When you enter that URL it redirects to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop, dont ask why, thats the way they set it up and thats what im stuck with. So, how do i resolve the 301 issue here. we want all things to point to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk, in terms of SEO but does the fact that there is a redirect going to /shop make this an issue? we appear to have: www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop www.greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop all these URL's go to the same same page so what is the best way to correct this? thanks for any help on this Lee
Technical SEO | | IPIM0 -
Worth Changing Redirect From 302 to 301?
Hi, I'm doing an audit on a site that had a redesign in Dec 2009. For some reason I looked to see what kind of redirects were used from the old pages to the current ones, and it looks like they used 302s, which obviously isn't ideal. Given that it's been so long and those pages have looong since been de-indexed, is it worth me suggesting that they change those old redirects to 301s? My thinking is that if those old pages were linked to externally then I should recommend it, but I can't find any link info on Linkscape/OSE, Majestic SEO or YSE. Any comments appreciated.
Technical SEO | | The_Heavies0