302 a Homepage?
-
I am working with a site that wants to temporarily show a promotional landing page instead of their homepage. Theoretically you could do a 302, but what are the SEO implications of doing such a thing? I would appreciate any first hand experience or feedback on the idea. Ultimately it will not be my decision, but I do have influence.
As a side note, there homepage is a mess (visually displeasing) and they really need a new website. This is one of the reasons that they are leaning this way.
Thanks in advance for the feedback.
-
I have a similar situation. I've run an A/B test that indicates that the existing home page (let's call this A) doesn't convert as well as a deeper page (call it B), even for visitors who have seen no other pages on the site.
Until the new home page (A) is ready, I want to take advantage of the immediate gains available by redirecting traffic, in the short term, to B.
I'm confident that 302 is the "correct" way of doing this, since the redirect is temporary, but I'm spooked about how Google will treat this.
Matt, both A and B are already indexed, and both will remain "live" after the permanent fix is in place. Would you still have concerns about a 302?
-
I don't have a lot of experience using 302 redirects as usually a 301 was the best way to go with. But in this case I'd say that the 302 is indeed a bit too much for what you want to do. I would go with the suggestion above as well and temporarily replace the homepage just with the new landing page that you'd like to set up to make sure people will get that one.
-
Never, ever use a 302. People can disagree with me, but I have seen issues with how Google treats the 302s. If you read the technical specifications on what a 302 is for, your example is a good use case. The reality of how Google treats the URL is that you end up with 2 URLs indexed and then the new URL will stay indexed when you remove the 302. It just ends up as a big mess.
Why not just show the new landing page design on the home page show a 200? Just switch out the code for the page temporarily? Google will just see the new info on the page, and it may help the old page if it was such a mess. Save the old code and you can always switch it back.
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
-
Website homepage temporarily getting removed from google index
hi, website: www.snackmagic.com The home page goes out of google index for some hours and then comes back. We are not sure why our home page is getting de-indexed temporarily. This doesn't happen with other pages on our website. This has been happening intermittently in the gap of 2-3 days. Any inputs will be very useful for us to debug this issue Thanks
Technical SEO | | manikbystadium0 -
Site:www.domainname.com - does not find homepage in Google (only inner pages - why?)
When I do a Google search on site:www.domainname.com, my clients homepage does not appear. Other inner pages do. The same thing happend a while ago and I did 'fetch by google' in Search Console. After that the homepage was indexed again when I did a site:www.domainname.com search. But now (2 weeks later), it's gone again. When I search on the brand name of the website in Google it does find the homepage. I don't know why it doesn't find the homepage when I do a site: search. Any ideas? [see images where you can see the problem] XTrDn 2doHF
Technical SEO | | robk1230 -
Canonical homepage link uses trailing slash while default homepage uses no trailing slash, will this be an issue?
Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues. I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com. I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers. Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this. What says you?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Is there an SEO advantage to blog content being a child of /blog/ rather than the homepage?
I'm working on a website where all the blog content is listed as separate pages from the homepage, eg: www.domain.com/first-blog-post
Technical SEO | | MillyShaw
www.domain.com/second-blog-post However, it would make my life easier if all blog content was listed under /blog/ so that I could analyse it better in Google Analytics. Eg I'd like it to be: www.domain.com/blog/first-blog-post
www.domain.com/blog/second-blog-post The developer is not keen because it would create extra work for him, and he's also said it's a bad idea from an SEO point of view. But is this the case? Presumably with 301s in place it wouldn't make a difference? Thanks for your help!0 -
Issue with Title of Homepage - Wordpress Platform
I can't seem to get Google to read the title of my homepage the way I would like it to be read and I have double checked in all areas of my Wordpress Platform where the title may be defaulting and all it set up correctly. I have also ensured that the "force re-write of titles and meta descriptions" have been checked through a plugin I am using to monitor SEO (Yoast)... here is an example of how Google is reading my homepage title: XYZ Company: Primary Keyword in Ontario Canada - XYZ Company I would like it to read: Primary Keyword in Ontario Canada - XYZ Company But for some reason it keeps pulling in my website title. I have always re-submitted my URL to Google but no luck with the title change. If anyone has any insight as to why this is defaulting as such I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Only my website homepage is appearing in search and the other indvidual pages are not coming up?This happened after the website revamp
We have revamped our website http://www.wsinetpower.com/ after te revamp the SEO rankings went down and the inner pages are not appearing in serach. What could be the reason
Technical SEO | | Muna0 -
302 or 301 redirect to https ?
I am redirecting whole site to https. Is there a difference between 302 or 301 redirect for seo? Site never been indexed. Planning to do that with .htaccess command RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
Technical SEO | | Kotkov
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L] There are plenty of ways http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/ssl-example-usage-in-htaccess.html Which way would be the best? Thanks is advance0 -
Title Tag for homepage Not displaying correctly in Google Search Results
Hi We have a problem with how Google is is displaying our title tag when a user does a search on our company name Increation. I have attached two images of how the title tag for our Homepage is dispayed in Google Search Results. One of them is "increations" - this is the result which is displaying incorrectly. The other shows Kitchens | Bathrooms | | Luxury Kitchens | - which is how we want the title tag to be dispalyed. This inorreclt result is only displayed when a user types in Increation into Google. (BTW it only happens on Google, not the other search engines). To give you some background an external SEO company did some work for us (before I joined as usual :-)). They built a lot of anchor links with the word "Increations" pointing back to our home page. Is this whats causing the probelm? Also how can we resolve this issue so that the correct Title Tag is displayed. Thanks for your help. Mik increation_search_results_google#hyhfZ
Technical SEO | | increation0