301 v/s 302 Redirection on Homepage (Multilingual)
-
Hello,
Our website: http://www.luxresorts.com currently has a default 302 redirection to http://www.luxresorts.com/en.
We would like to do a 301 redirection instead of a 302 to http://www.luxresorts.com.
Our concern is that the site is multilingual and we wonder what effect would the 301 redirection have on search engine crawlers and how would this appear on SERP.
When a search is done on Google.com, the English version of our website appears and when on Google.FR, the French version appears. Would the 301 redirection change the way our website appear on Google?
Grateful if you could help us out in understanding the pros and cons/best practices for our concern.
Thanks in advance.
Tej Luchmun.
-
Thanks.
Done since a while and already live
Tej Luchmun
-
Yes.
-
Thanks a lot for your reply gfiorelli1.
We currently have no redirection based on IP detection nor user agent.
Taking into account the two options you mentioned, the best option would definitely be to make luxresorts.com the main page for the targeted country (while we would make the current default page http://www.luxresorts.com/en 301 to http://www.luxresorts.com) and then having a browser language detection then serve the language accordingly.
Do you think this would be the best thing to do?
Thanks again.
-Tej Luchmun
-
Thanks a lot Andy, we definitely want to preserve the Link Juice, since http://www.luxresorts.com has a higher SEO value, but currently having a 302 to /en.
I guess we would go for the 301 soon.
-
One fundamental question: is the redirection based on IP detection or user agent?
Because if it is over IP detection, then that's something Google deprecates.
Instead, if it based over User Agent, then 302 and 301 are substantially the same for Google in this case, even though with a 301 you are sure to pass link equity.
On the other hand, why have not you considered these two options:
- Making the root domain luxury.com the country selector page, so people land there then choose the country they want;
- Dedicating the luxury.com root to the main country target, not using redirections at all and adding a over alert to all the people entering in the root that exist a version targeting their country (alert based on IP Detection, this time correctly).
-
Hi Tej,
Moz have a best practice guide on redirects here, but the general rule of thumb is that a 301 is used for most scenarios where a permanent redirect is required. This also passes more link juice than a 302, which is generally used for temporary redirects, and passes no link juice.
In terms of SEO, a 301 is almost always the preferred option because of the benefits in helping a site retain a more natural flow of link juice.
-Andy
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
-
302 > 302 > 301 Redirect Chain Issue & Advice
Hi everyone, I recently relaunched our website and everything went well. However, while checking site health, I found a new redirect chain issue (302 > 302 > 301 > 200) when the user requests the HTTP and non-www version of our URL. Here's what's happening: • 302 #1 -- http://domain.com/example/ 302 redirects to http://domain.com/PnVKV/example/ (the 5 characters in the appended "subfolder" are dynamic and change each time)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew_In_Search_of_Answers
• 302 #2 -- http://domain.com/PnVKV/example/ 302 redirects BACK to http://domain.com/example/
• 301 #1 -- http://domain.com/example/ 301 redirects to https://www.domain.com/example/ (as it should have done originally)
• 200 -- https://www.domain.com/example/ resolves properly We're hosted on AWS, and one of my cloud architects investigated and reported GoDaddy was causing the two 302s. That's backed up online by posts like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46307518/random-5-alpha-character-path-appended-to-requests and https://www.godaddy.com/community/Managing-Domains/My-domain-name-not-resolving-correctly-6-random-characters-are/td-p/60782. I reached out to GoDaddy today, expecting them to say it wasn't a problem on their end, but they actually confirmed this was a known bug (as of September 2017) but there is no timeline for a fix. I asked the first rep I spoke with on the phone to send a summary, and here's what he provided in his own words: From the information gathered on my end and I was able to get from our advanced tech support team, the redirect issue is in a bug report and many examples have been logged with the help of customers, but no log will be made in this case due to the destination URL being met. Most issues being logged are site not resolving properly or resolving errors. I realize the redirect can cause SEO issues with the additional redirects occurring. Also no ETA has been logged for the issue being reported. I do feel for you since I now understand more the SEO issues it can cause. I myself will keep an eye out for the bug report and see if any progress is being made any info outside of this I will email you directly. Thanks. Issue being Experienced: Domains that are set to Go Daddy forwarding IPs may sometimes resolve to a url that has extra characters appended to the end of them. Example: domain1.com forwards to http://www.domain2.com/TLYEZ. However it should just forward to http://www.domain2.com. I think this answers what some Moz users may have been experiencing sporadically, especially this previous thread: https://moz.com/community/q/forwarded-vanity-domains-suddenly-resolving-to-404-with-appended-url-s-ending-in-random-5-characters. My question: Given everything stated above and what we know about the impact of redirect chains on SEO, how severe should I rate this? I told my Director that I would recommend we move away from GoDaddy (something I don't want to do, but feel we _**have **_to do), but she viewed it as just another technical SEO issue and one that didn't necessarily need to be prioritized over others related to the relaunch. How would you respond in my shoes? On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the biggest), how big of a technical SEO is this? Would you make it a priority? At the very least, I thought the Moz community would benefit from the GoDaddy confirmation of this issue and knowing about the lack of an ETA on a fix. Thanks!0 -
301 Redirects... Redirect all content at once or in increments?
Hello, I have been reading a lot about site migration and 301s and sometimes get confused with conflicting suggestions from different sources... So, in a site migration. Should I 301 redirect all old URLs to the news at once or little by little? I've see this Google handout that suggests doing it all at once (minute 13)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Koki.Mourao
https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cfco632lor7bl55j3tg1g8332l0 But also have read the opposite in other forums...0 -
Can I undo a 301 redirect? Will it penalize my ranking?
I'm in charge of building a website for a company that made a mess. They own domain xxx.it (xxx is not the real domain, just a placeholder). Some years ago they 301 redirected xxx.it to xxx.com (they just changed TLDs). Last year they 301 redirected xxx.com to yyy.com (so, they actually changed domains). Now, after 13 months, the company failed and the new leadership wants me to undo everything and 301 redirect from yyy.com to xxx.it. So: 301 redirect is permanent. So, conceptually it's wrong to undo it. What happens if I undo it? Will my ranking be penalized, even if a significant amount of time has passed (13 months)? Will crawlers detect a loop (even if i remove any 301 redirect from xxx.it and theorically break the loop)? Here is the potential loop: xxx.it -> xxx.com -> yyy.com -> xxx.it -> etc... All of the articles I found on the web are quite old and not clear about this topic, that's why I'm asking this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naska19900 -
301 Redirecting from Static to Dynamic URLs. I think we messed up
I'm looking for some guidance on an issue I believe we created for ourselves and if we undo what we did. We recently added attributed search to our sites. This of course created a bunch of dynamically generated URLS. For various reasons, it was decided to take some of our existing static URLs and 301 redirect them to their dyanamic counterpart. Ex .../Empire-Paintball-Masks-0Y.aspx now redirects to .../Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles-0Y.aspx?Manufacturer=Empire Many of these stat URLS had top 3 rankings for their associated keywords. Now, we don't rank for anything. I realize that 301 redirecting is the way to go...if you NEED to. My guess is our drop in keyword ranking is directly tied to what we did. I'm looking for an solid argument to be made to my boss as to why we should not have done this and that it, more than likely has resulted in dropped keyword rankings and organic traffic. I welcome any input. Also, if we decided to revert back (remove all 301 redirects and de-index all dynamic URLS), what is the likely hood we can recapture some of this lost organic traffic? Can I disallow indexing in a robot.txt file to remove, say anything with a '?' in the URL? Would the above URL example (which was ranking in the top 3 in SERPs), have a good chance of finding its way back? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Istoresinc1 -
Redirecting site from html/php to wordpress
I've never come across this and haven't been able to really find anything that explains it very well. I want to get opinions before we make a definitive decision. Here's the scenario... I am working on a site that was built in HTML/PHP and some of the pages are ranking pretty well. (some page 1, but not number 1) We are going to start using the Wordpress platform by year's end. The pages that were built in html have been built a little spammy but they still rank. I just think they are keyword stuffed a little and not very "reader friendly" (I think the last person was spinning content). So, we've built completely new content on our new pages and we've commissioned really good content writers for them. I will be handling the on-page SEO going forward so I know what to do there. My questions are this.... Should I 301 the old pages to the new pages with the better content? (old pages have the .html or .php extensions so www.example.com/keyword.php will become www.example.com/keyword-keyword Is there any negative side to doing this since the content will be completely different then the old pages that are being 301 from. (Keywords are pretty much staying the same with the exception of minor variations. ie, www.example.com/red-cashmere-sweater.php to www.example.com/cashmere-sweater) I ask this because I've moved sites before where I've just changed the location of the same content. I've never done it where the content is changing and so is the URL extension. Thank you in advance for your help and guidance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarinPirkey0 -
Warning about a 302 redirect
Hello everyone, I'm testing the pro software and recently I installed an SSL Certificate on one of the websites I'm monitoring, I put in place an .htaccess directive to force all traffic to the secure version of the site (https) and I noticed how this raised a warning because my directive is forcing the traffic with a 302 redirect. These are the lines: _RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80 _ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com/$1 [R,L] I understand that this is not good so I figured since I'm already redirecting all www to -www I can force traffic that arrives trying to use www to the secure version like so: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example.com$ RewriteRule (.*) https://example.com/$1 [R=301,L] But this is not 100% effective because if someone visits the site directly on the -www version this person wont get redirected hence it wont be forced to see the https. So my question is: does anybody know of an alternate way to force traffic to the secure socket using a 301 instead of a 302? Oh boy, just by writing the question I think I may have figured it out, I'll post it anyways because (1) I could be wrong and (2) It could help someone else. It just hit me but the directive that is forcing www to -www specifies what type of redirect to do here [R=301,L]. So to try to answer my own question before even posting it this could probably do the trick: _RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80 _ _RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com/$1 [_R=301,R,L] I'll be testing it out ASAP and again I'll post the question anyways just in case it doesn't work, in case someone has a good suggestion or to help someone that could be in the same situation. If this is turns out right I will need someone to slap me in the face 😐
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevenpicado0 -
301 redirect every pages?
Good evening, my question might sound stupid but please forgive me, I am still learning SEO. If I build a new site that will replace an existing site. Is there any point to do a 301 redirect for pages that had no inbound link so, no juice to pass? I kind of think that it would be a better practice to 301 redirect each pages to a page that make sense on the new web site .... but here is why I think that. Why I say that If I am lucky, many of my old web site pages will be indexed, many of them having no inbound links. So once the new web site online, until all my new web sites pages are indexed, I could imagine Google would send people to the index pages (the old ones that do not exist anymore)... I am right? So in that case, if I do a 301 redirect only for pages that have inbound links, the user would end up on a 404 page. Could you tell me if it make sense how I think? Thanks a lot !! Nancy P.S. I would not redirect if it make no sense to the user. I fully understand that we must always keep the user experience in mind in any 404 and 301 redirect decisions. But to simplify the question, just suppose it is ok from a user perspective to map every old site pages to a page in new web site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnigmaSolution0 -
301 Redirects After Company Acquisition
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt1