302 redirects, canonicalise or redirect (301)?
-
Hey Guys,
I am fairly new to 'technical' SEO as I was lucky enough in my old role to have technical expertise in the team for things like this, now I am learning myself and it is a slow and painful process, so your expertise is soooo much appreciated! My I.T. dept say that I have 3 instances on my website where the Hybris platform is creating a 302 redirect automatically - the first:
- URL doesn't exist - Hybris creates a temp 302 - the system does not create case sensitive url's
| http://www.example.fr/Example/Marques/0180/brand/CHANEL | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 |
| http://www.example.fr/Example/Marques/0015/brand/Giorgio-Armani | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 |
| http://www.example.fr/fr/Example/marken/0507/brand/lancome | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 |I believe these are being redirected due to the fact that capital letters are being created in the url.
- Multi-lingual redirects
I have a German and French version of my site and whenever any switches from one URL to the other using our language selector a 302 is created.
- Dynamic URL elements
Dynamic url elements and special characters are being created in the URL, I am not sure where this is happening, but my I.T. department would like me to go and see whether this is something that can be created by a browser.
If anyone has any similar problems or have any advice or insights even, I would love to hear from you! Thanks
-
Thank you Ethan, Yes I will recommend a 301 redirect to the I.T. guys, but I do think that my I.T. guys wont like me much
Please can I ask - why would I need to create more content to canonicalise it if I already have two url's? Would I not just add code to both pages?
If the page 1 url exists and temp redirects it to the page 2 url, would I not just add code to both pages? Or if I add code to the page 1 url, would it be exactly the same to the other variations?
Please teach me this as I will need to explain it to the I.T. dept as this was there recommendations. I think I will most definitely need tech help moving forward!
Thanks a lot for your time!
-
Thanks Patrick,
This is indeed helpful. I have read these links; SO:
-
Redirects should be 301.
-
I need to add href lang tags (for google and bing) on my website and I need to look more into geo targeting in more detail.
- Do you recommend I need to find out why these urls are being created? and yes this has also crossed over with the duplicate content project we are running too. But 301's are a solution until I figure out why these url's are being created so we can get it fixed.
I will check the sitemap today.
Thanks for your advice
-
-
Hi there
I recommend learning the best practices for redirects, as well as hreflang attributes and language tags - you should also read into country targeting your sites in Google and Bing - this is a big deal for international SEO and targeting.
I would also look into your dynamic URLs by reading through this resource from Google on potential duplicate content - this will help you categorize and manage your URLs, helping Google understand their purpose. You should also check your internal links and sitemap to make sure that there are not dynamic URLs listed there.
This will require your web development team as well, so make sure they read and understand these resources, both for current and future situations. Some of this has the tendency to get pretty technical and indepth so if you need help, know that Moz has a fantastic Recommended Companies page to help.
That being said, 301 redirects are preferred by search engines, 302s passes 0% link juice and most cases should not be used, and all URLs (and their dynamic variations) should have a canonical tag to the preferred URL.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
Do a 301, there's no need to create more content just to canonicalize it. 302's aren't too bad, but the permanent redirect is best practice.
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
-
What is the code to 301 http to www in htaccess file on unix server
i want to 301 my http home page to www on a linux server and all my other redirects are set up similar to this in my htaccess file: redirect 301 /example-page.html http://www.example-page.html how do I 301 redirect: http://example.com to http://www.example.com I've tried all kinds of code recommended for an htaccess file on a linux server and nothing seems to work. Thanks for the help mozzers! Ron
Web Design | | Ron100 -
What happens if I 301 Redirect my homepage to a different page on site
If i were to 301 redirect the index page of my website to a page in a different subdirectory of my site would that adversely affect SEO? Does your home page need to be in the root of your site? I'm asking because a developer has told me that it would be best to do that since he needs to install OpenCart on the root of our domain...
Web Design | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
Main page redirect affecting search results?
Question.... A recent change was made to our page www.BGU.edu by a marketing person. So now when you type in www.BGU.edu it actually redirects to a different page www.BGU.edu/inquiry This is a really bad idea isn't it? I do not know enough about SEO to know a lot, and just joined SEOmoz but do I need to tell the admin to change it back?
Web Design | | nongard10 -
Redirecting duplicate pages
For whatever reason, X-cart creates duplicates of our categories and articles so that we have URLs like this www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars
Web Design | | k9byron
www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/ or http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar
http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar/ now our SEO guy says that we dont have to redirect these because google is "smart enough" to know they are the same, and that we should "leave it as-is". However, everything I have read online says that google sees this as dupe content and that we should redirect to one or the other / or no /, depending on which most of our internal links already point to, which is with a slash. What should we do? Redirect or leave it as is? Thanks!0 -
Show root domain (that is 301 redirected) in SERP?
Hi, If I have the domain name www.businessname.com.au pointing (using 301 redirect) to a particular page on a business directory site (eg www.bizdirectory.com.au/businessname), is it possible to have the URL www.businessname.com.au displayed in the Google search results rather than the destination page of www.bizdirectory.com.au/businessname? Thanks in advance,
Web Design | | blackrails
Adam0 -
Page Redirection solution
Page Redirection solution needs, there are 2 sites in the same folder and one page of old site is bxxxxxseo.com/products.php new site bxxxxxseo.com/product_list.php .there are many old page indexed i wanna redirect all old pages to relevant pages of new site using SEO friendly way .Any help really appropriate. Thank you
Web Design | | innofidelity0 -
Is it OK to 301 Redirect http://homepage.com to http://blog.homepage.com?
I don't have a homepage built yet, and I suspect that my blog will be my primary SEO draw in the long term, so I'd like to do a 301 redirect (for the techies, I'm doing it in Django with http.HttpResponsePermanentRedirect ) I just wanted to confirm that this wouldn't cause any problems as Google gets used to my page (it's only been up for a few days) Thanks! -matt
Web Design | | 49wetnoodles0