301 or 302 Redirects with locale URLs?

[Virginia-Girtz]

Hi Mozers,

I have a bit of a tricky question I need some help answering. My agency are building a brand new website for a client of ours which means changing the domain name (yay...). So! I have my 301's all ready to go for the UK locale, however, the issue I have is that the site will also eventually have French, German and Spanish locales - but these won't be ready to go until later this year. We will be launching in just English for September. The current site already has the French and German locales on it as well.

Just to make sure I'm being clear, the site will be www.example.com for launch, but by lets say November, we will also have a www.example.com/fr/ and www.example.com/de/ site launched too.

So what do I do with the locale URLs? As I said above, the exisitng site already has the French and German locales on it, so I don't particularly want to redirect the /fr/ and /de/ URLs to the English homepage, as I will want to redirect them to the new URLs in November, and redirecting more than once is bad for SEO right?

Any ideas? Would 302s maybe be the best suggestion?

Thanks!

Virginia

[Virginia-Girtz]

Thanks Greg. Yeah, I didn't really want to go down the 302 route, it makes everything so much more time sensitive!

[Virginia-Girtz]

Thanks Rob!

I'm trying to encourage my client as much as possible to start work on the translations of the sites ASAP so that we don't end up going down the Google Translate route. I've advised against this already.

Your advise has been really helpful!

Thanks

[RobCairns]

Hi Virginia,

In all honesty, it's probably not going to matter very much which kind of redirect you are using. If I understand you correctly, your current redirect chain will look like:

www.example.com -->        www.example2.com
www.example.com/fr -->     www.example2.com
www.example.com/de -->   www.example2.com

The reason redirects won't matter is that in November your second French, Dutch, etc. sites are going live. The redirects will have to be changed in November to look more like this:

www.example.com -->        www.example2.com
www.example.com/fr -->     www.example2.com/fr
www.example.com/de -->   www.example2.com/de

Given that there is a maximum of 6-8 weeks when these redirects will be active, Google will barely have time to index them before you are changing your redirect chain all over again. In my books, that makes these redirects somewhat redundant - either way you are going to have some SEO changes occurring during that time which will probably be in a downward direction. That being said, you will want to finish up with 301 redirects since that will be the permanent fix.

However, once the new redirects are placed and indexed, you should see things return to normal and even improve if the new sites are featuring good UX. Keep in mind that any redirect is going to hurt your link profile a little bit, so you can expect to lose some rankings once your redirects are indexed.

Bottom line:

1. Focus on ensuring the new sites are well put-together with good content
2. Make sure proper translations are taken care of (this is a HUGE problem with multi-lingual sites)
3. Try to avoid Google Translate plugin for translation services (doesn't sound like this is what you're doing)
4. More importance should be placed on the UX of the site and the link profile impacts of 301 redirects
5. Make sure 301 redirects are what you finish up with after the new sites go live in November

Feel free to reach out if I can be of more assistance.

Cheers,

Rob

[greg.lanier]

Also, I understand your confusion in 301 vs 302. I mean essentially, your redirect is temporary. But 302 redirects are meant more so for short time periods, probably with a month being the max amount of time you would want to do this. You'll want to use a 301 to maintain linking power. There's no harm in doing so and then replacing it later.

[greg.lanier]

You would remove the old 301 redirect from www.example.com/fr/ to www.example.com and add a new one from www.example.com/fr/ to www.example2.com/fr/ , then force a recrawl on your site.

[Virginia-Girtz]

But what will happen when I have to 301 again? Currently, I will have to redirect from www.example.com/fr/ to my new English only site which is www.example.com. But then in 3 months time, I will have a www.example2.com/fr/. So I want my old www.example.com/fr/ to redirect to my new www.example2.com/fr/ website. So how would that work?

[ThomasHarvey]

Personally I think a 301 redirect would be the best.

[Mustansar]

I reckon you must use 301 as it seems like you're moving your sites permanently so there is no point to have 302 at all.