Site Redesign: 302 Query
-
Hi there,
We'll be redesigning our website www.example.com and as such want to 302 users from www.example.com and all other pages to a new URL www.example.com/landingpage while we go through the redesign. The new landing page will have copy and a sign up form on it and once the redesign is completed, we plan on removing the 302 and sending all traffic back to the original url www.example.com.
I'd just like to check that a 302 is the most relevant option here? Obviously, once redesign is completed we'll 301 any old URLs to their new locations once completed.
-
Hemblem,
Although you're redesigning the site, I actually don't recommend using a 302 redirect during the 'redesign' process, as it can have disastrous effects on search engine rankings. I would prefer that you keep the current website up and running: and then 301 redirecting the appropriate pages when the site is ready to go live.
I realize that you want to do, but I have seen too many websites have problems getting things straightened out with the search engines to do what you're suggesting.
-
Is there a reason you don't want the existing site to be available to users while the redesign is going on? the usual process in this kind of situation is to leave the current site alone, and built the redesign site on a dev subdomain which you block from the search engines via password or IP exclusions. Then when the redesign is done, you promote the dev version to live with all the new 301 redirects already in place.
An alternative, if the site won't be out of commission for very long, is to have the site return a 503 server header code. This simply tells the search engines the site is temporarily unavailable and NOT to index anything until the 503 is removed. This ensures that the temporary landing page doesn't get indexed as the new content for the site's pages.
But still, option number 1 is preferable. Would it work in this instance?
Paul
-
It sounds like a temporary redirect so, yes a 302 would be correct. Remember 302's do not pass link juice though.
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
-
Site Migration Questions
Hello everyone, We are in the process of going from a .net to a .com and we have also done a complete site redesign as well as refreshed all of our content. I know it is generally ideal to not do all of this at once but I have no control over that part. I have a few questions and would like any input on avoiding losing rankings and traffic. One of my first concerns is that we have done away with some of our higher ranking pages and combined them into one parallax scrolling page. Basically, instead of having a product page for each product they are now all on one page. This of course has made some difficulty because search terms we were using for the individual pages no longer apply. My next concern is that we are adding keywords to the ends of our urls in attempt to raise rankings. So an example: website.com/product/product-name/keywords-for-product if a customer deletes keywords-for-product they end up being re-directed back to the page again. Since the keywords cannot be removed is a redirect the best way to handle this? Would a canonical tag be better? I'm trying to avoid duplicate content since my request to remove the keywords in urls was denied. Also when a customer deletes everything but website.com/product/ it goes to the home page and the url turns to website.com/product/#. Will those pages with # at the end be indexed separately or does google ignore that? Lastly, how can I determine what kind of loss in traffic we are looking at upon launch? I know some is to be expected but I want to avoid it as much as I can so any advice for this migration would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sika220 -
Mobile site content and main site content
Help, pls! I have one main site and a mobile version of that site (m.domain.com). The main site has more pages, more content, different named urls. The main site has consistently done well in Google. The mobile site has not: the mobile site is buried. I am working on adding more content to the mobile site, but am concerned about duplicate content. Could someone pls tell me the best way to deal with these two versions of our site? I can't use rel=canonical because the urls do not correspond to the same names on the main site, or can I? Does this mean I need to change the url names, offer different content (abridged), etc? I really am at a loss as to how to interpret Google's rules for this. Could someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? Any help or tips would GREATLY appreciated!!!!! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Site not loading on Firefox
Hello guys, I can't get my website to be loaded on Firefox, why's that?
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Cross links between sites
hi, We have several ecommerce sites and we cross linked 3 of them by mistake. We realize that the sites were linked through WMT, We have shut down 2 of the sites about 2 months ago, but WMT still shows the links coming from those 2 sites. how do we make sure that google will see the sites are shut down. Is there a better of way resolving this issue. We are no longer using those sites, so do not need them to be active. whats the best solution to show google that the links are no longer there. Crawler shows that it was able to crawl the site 45 days after it is shut down. thanks nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Crawling a subfolder with a dev site
I am trying to set up a campaign where I am crawling a subfolder of our main site where I have dev version of the new site. However, even though the new site resolves and I have included the full resolving URL but the crawl results come back saying that only one page has been crawled. The site has had a protected block on it for a period of time but this has now been removed. Any ideas? Thanks Nick
Technical SEO | | Total_Displays0 -
Internal Links on eCommerce sites
I have been working on an eCommerce site; www.pretavoir.co.uk over the past year. Improvements in SERPs have been good with many top three positions. However, there are other important keywords of similar difficulty which refuse to behave in a similar way.... The site is PR4 and has a homepage PA 52. The homepage includes links to internal brand pages eg Prada, Gucci etc. Q Would it be worthwhile creating footer anchor text with eaxct text eg Prada sunglasses, Gucci Sunglasses?? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Young site trying hard, but banging head against the wall -- Site Review
Hi All New to PRO but we're seriously committed to getting this working. And firstly thank you to anyone who offers any useful thoughts and insights. We've launched a new site, unfortunately late to the market for the season and are really struggling to get search engine recognition. Site: http://www.ignitehats.co.uk/ We're continuously adding new content, slowly gathering more links and working hard to promote socially. But even on our clearest search terms like "Ignite hats" we're down on page 4. Both GWT and the Seomoz tools highlight no big problems (a few titles that are too long) but otherwise nothing. Maybe wrongly we requested that the Google spam team review our site incase it was being penalised, but got a template response saying the site was not in their spam system (phew, there wasn't a reason it should be we believe). We're wondering if this is just that our site is just too young? It's been live for 6 weeks. But worry maybe this is not the case. We've had success with another site we run much sooner than this. Any help or pointers would be really appreciated. Similar stories and what others have done, at least to give us some confidence to carry on would be great. Thanks for reading.
Technical SEO | | JHill0 -
Are lots of links from an external site to non-existant pages on my site harmful?
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a heck of a lot of 404s which are due to an external site linking incorrectly to my site. The site itself has scraped content from elsewhere and has created 100's of malformed URLs. Since it unlikely I will have any joy having these linked removed by the creator of the site, I'd like to know how much damage this could be doing, and if so, is there is anything I can do to minimise the impact? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140