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.
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?
-
This is a friend's tool that has some more options.
http://incredibill.me/htaccess-rewrite-wizard -
We will remove a vertical/division from our current site and migrate the URLs (category and product-specific pages) to new URLs under a new domain. Let me know your thoughts Max!
By the way, thanks for sharing the redirect generator tool.
-
Thanks esiow2013 & others for discussing on 301 redirect, I also had same issue.
-
That's also a useful tool Ash, although it won't deal with URLs that that have parameters in such as question marks.
-
I have found that a 301 takes some time to take effect in the index, so I don't bother with a 302 first, There are many redirect tools on the web and I like this one: http://www.rapidtables.com/web/tools/redirect-generator.htm
-
What are you actually doing, redesigning a site and URLs have changed?
Although regardless, the process is normally the same. As soon as you have launched your new site, made live your new page or whatever is you are redirecting, set the redirects at the same time. There is no reason to delay them and again I really wouldn't bother with doing the redirects as 302's to start with. Just set the 301's, then check them all after, then double check. Even if some are incorrect after implementing, its no biggie. Simply edit it again so its correct .
The best thing to do is prepare all your redirects before I hand. I like to get organised and use a spread sheet with two columns, old URLs in one column, new URLs in the 2nd column. This way you can easily map them out.
Also to speed up the process of actually coding the redirects, I use this tool, it saves a huge amount of time: HtAccess 301 Redirect Generator Tool .
-
Thanks Max! Your answers are a big help. Last question, do I need to 301 redirect the old to new URLs within the day we will launch the new site after removing the old site? or should we prepare 302 redirects and check each URL that are still live(will be removed in site launch) if they land on the appropriate and new URLs and run 301 redirections after?
-
Like you mentioned, the reasoning behind doing 302 redirects initially is in case the redirect has been set incorrectly, giving you time to check them before Google re-crawls and updates the index. As 302 redirects are temporary, after setting the redirect the old page will usually stay in Google's index indefinitely.
However I do many 301 redirects every week and I have never taken this approach; I simply set the 301 redirect, then check everything is correct straight after. If you have hundreds of redirects to do you can check them more efficiently using the Screaming Frog web crawler. You can import your list of pages that should have been redirected in a txt file, then Screaming frog will crawl them telling you what response code they are sending and where they are redirecting too.
Even if you set an incorrect 301 redirect, it can takes weeks to months before Google updates the index, so you shouldn't really need to worry about sending the 'juice' to the incorrect page; although I suppose it depends on how long until you check if you have done those redirects correctly!
There could also be adverse issues. Say you were doing a site migration and you 302 redirected every URL on your site to other URLs, I don't know how Google would react to that, but it could be rather bad!
As the saying goes 'Measure Twice, Cut Once'!
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
-
Do bulk 301 redirects hurt seo value?
We are working with a content based startup that needs to 301 redirect a lot of its pages to other websites. Will give you an example to help you understand. If we assume this is the startups domain and URL structure www.ourcompany.com/brand1/article What they want to do is do a 301 redirect of www.ourcompany.com/brand1/ to www.brand1.com I have never seen 301 as a problem to SEO or link juice. But in this case where all the major URLs are getting redirected to other sites i was wondering if it would have a negative effect. Right now they have just 20-30 brands but they are planning to hit a couple of hundreds this year.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aaronfernandez0 -
301 Redirect - Rank Recovery Examples?
Hi All, I recently did a 301 redirect. Page to Page and the notified google via its console. Its been 6 days since. The home page and one other high traffic page swopped out with the new domain on google search index with 3-4 drops in ranking for each. The rest of the sites pages have been indexed but still reflect the old domain when searched. Recently today my home page dropped even further to the second page of google index for the specific keyword. Can you share similar experiences and how long it took you to recover rank fully? and how long for all pages to swop out on google search's index? Regards Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeBlue10 -
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas0 -
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...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner1 -
How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?
Hi All, In order to avoid duplication errors we've decided to redirect old categories (merge some categories).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
In the past we have been very generous with the number of categories we assigned each post. One category needs to be redirected back to blog home (removed completely) while a couple others should be merged. Afterwords we will re-categorize some of the old posts. What is the proper way to do so?
We are not technical, Is there a plugin that can assist? Thanks0 -
How do 302 redirects from Akamai content targeting impact SEO?
How do 302 redirects from Akamai content targeting impact SEO? I'm using Akamai content targeting to get people from countries and languages to the right place (eg www.abc.123 to redirect to www.abc.123/NL-nl/default.aspx where folks from the Netherlands get their localized site in dutch) and from the edge server closest to them. As far as I know Akamai doesn't allow me to use anything but a 302. Anyone run across this? is this 302 a problem? I did a fetch as googlebot on my main domain and all I see is the Akamai 302. I can't imagine this is the first time Akamai has run across this but I would like to know for sure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Positec0 -
How To 301 Redirect .html pages
I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location. I don't know how to do this. All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc. From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file. I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php. I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server. I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0