Multilang site: Auto redirect 301 or 302?
-
We need to establish if 301 or 302 response code is to be used for our auto redirects based on Accept-Language header.
https://domain.com
30x > https://domain.com/en
30x > https://domain.com/ru
30x > https://domain.com/deThe site architecture is set up with proper inline HREFLANG.
We have read different opinions about this, Ahrefs says 302 is the correct one:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/301-vs-302-redirects/
302 redirect:
"You want to redirect users to the right version of the site for them (based on location/language)."You could argue that the root redirect is never permanent as it varies based on user language settings (302)
On the other hand, the lang specific redirects are permanent per language:IF Accept-Language header = en
https://domain.com > 301 > https://domain.com/en
IF Accept-Language header = ru
https://domain.com > 301 > https://domain.com/ruSo each of these is 'permanent'.
So which is the correct?
-
Hi Guys i am newer to SEO. my web with the 301 302 issue. anyone able help to fix it? will be high appreciated.
Internal URL
Yes
Full URL
https://myoffroadled.com/led-rocker-switch
HTTP status code
301 Moved permanently
First found at
Seed URL
Content type
text/html; charset=utf-8
Depth
0
Redirect URL
https://www.myoffroadled.com/led-rocker-switch/
Not crawled
Is redirect loop
No
Page rating
100 -
@fj66doneoiddpj In some cases users may have a reason for using the site in something other than their browser language.
For example, perhaps a shared device, or simply wishing to check a different localisation.
If your hreflang is working correctly, they should never see the "wrong" version anyhow.
But, there are pros and cons of course.
-
Thank you for the reply, 302 is also what we decided after many hours of reading.
The main reason for auto redirect is that we feel it's a better user experience as user will arrive the content target to his/her browser language. -
I would use a 302 here, just as an added insurance in case you ever accidentally serve Google the redirect.
However, I'm not a huge fan of auto redirects in general - they tend to cause issues for crawlers and users alike. Can you explain a bit more when/why the user gets redirected? Perhaps instead you could serve a country selection insterstitial if a user seems to be on the "wrong" variant?
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
-
Advise on the right way to block country specific users but not block Googlebot - and not be seen to be cloaking. Help please!
Hi, I am working on the SEO of an online gaming platform - a platform that can only be accessed by people in certain countries, where the games and content are legally allowed.
International SEO | | MarkCanning
Example: The games are not allowed in the USA, but they are allowed in Canada. Present Situation:
Presently when a user from the USA visits the site they get directed to a restricted location page with the following message: RESTRICTED LOCATION
Due to licensing restrictions, we can't currently offer our services in your location. We're working hard to expand our reach, so stay tuned for updates! Because USA visitors are blocked Google which primarily (but not always) crawls from the USA is also blocked, so the company webpages are not being crawled and indexed. Objective / What we want to achieve: The website will have multiple region and language locations. Some of these will exist as standalone websites and others will exist as folders on the domain. Examples below:
domain.com/en-ca [English Canada]
domain.com/fr-ca [french Canada]
domain.com/es-mx [spanish mexico]
domain.com/pt-br [portugese brazil]
domain.co.in/hi [hindi India] If a user from USA or another restricted location tries to access our site they should not have access but should get a restricted access message.
However we still want google to be able to access, crawl and index our pages. Can i suggest how do we do this without getting done for cloaking etc? Would this approach be ok? (please see below) We continue to work as the present situation is presently doing, showing visitors from the USA a restricted message.
However rather than redirecting these visitors to a restricted location page, we just black out the page and show them a floating message as if it were a model window.
While Googlebot would be allowed to visit and crawl the website. I have also read that it would be good to put paywall schema on each webpage to let Google know that we are not cloaking and its a restricted paid page. All public pages are accessible but only if the visitor is from a location that is not restricted Any feedback and direction that can be given would be greatly appreciated as i am new to this angle of SEO. Sincere thanks,0 -
Moving from single domain to multiple CCTLDs
Hi, I have a website targeting 3 markets (and therefor 3 languages). I was currently using a single domain with each market being targeted in the following format: www.website.com/pl
International SEO | | cellydy
www.website.com/de
www.website.com/hu It's clear to me by looking at organic results, that in my industry (Real Estate) Google is putting a large emphasis on local businesses and local domains. Top 10 organic results for all my keywords in all markets have country specific CCTLDs. I decided to migrate from a single domain strategy to a multi domain strategy. I own the domains. The new structure is www.website.com/pl -> www.website.pl
www.website.com/de -> www.website.de
www.website.com/hu -> www.website.hu All the website have been added to google search console and 301 redirects are in place and working correctly. The pages are all interlinked and have rel=alternate to each other. The sitemaps are all done correctly. My question is how do I tell Google about this. The change of address feature only works for changing one domain to one other domain. It's been a week and the old www.website.com domain is still showing up (even considering 301 redirects). Or do I just need to be patient and wait it out? Any tips?0 -
Merger & Acquisition Best Practices
Our company (DA 40) recently acquired another company (DA 20). The domain for the acquired company is up, and I am being asked if we should keep paying for the domain. I have a couple of questions regarding this. Is it best practice to continue paying for the older domain and do 301 redirects to our website? If yes, do I have to add 301 redirects for individual matching pages? For example, if the old site has the topic XYZ, should a 301 go to our site if we have a similar page topic XYZ? What about contact pages, about us, etc? Do we redirect all non-matching topics to the new home page? Or in the case of their blogs, do we redirect their blogs to the new blog home page even though we are not keeping their old blogs? What if our company keeps acquiring other companies, are we to assume we have to keep paying for the domains of the acquired companies? Is there anyone out there that would say stop paying for the old domain and just review the company's inbound links, reach out to those sites, and make sure they link to the new site instead? Thanks for the help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CharityHBS0 -
Redirection Question - Can Anyone Help?
Hi Community, I have 2 job boards. Job board A is a .co.uk domain. Job board B is uk.com domain. Job board A displays jobs in the UK but has an international jobs section. Job board B focuses entirely on international jobs. To cut a long story short we are shutting down Job board B as we are going to just be using Job board A in future. In terms of redirection, would it be best to: 1. 301 redirect job board B domain to Job board A. (www.jobboardb.uk.com -> www.jobboarda.co.uk) or 2. 301 redirect job board b to the international jobs section on job board a (as this is the most relevant place for the user to go I am thinking to go with option 2, but I read somewhere that it wasn't best practice. Any help is much appreciated.
International SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Subfolders and 301's
Hello all, Quite simply, I'm stuck. Well, I think I am. We are about to launch a whole new International side of our website. We're an education job board www.eteach.com for schools in the UK and a little internationally. Now that the business is growing we want to make our brand more global. All the big bosses wanted to create a brand new website called www.eteachinternational.com. I managed to persuade them to not to do that and instead use a subfolder approach off of our well established and strong domain www.eteach.com (phew). However, now I'm getting a little lost in making sure I don't duplicate my content. We have a staffroom section on our website which basically has lots of relevant content for people searching how to become a teacher, e.g. www.eteach.com/how-to-become-a-teacher. We also want this same content on the international subfolder, as it will still be relevant content for international teachers. However... Do I have to completely re-write the content (which I'm trying to avoid as it will be very similar) or can I put in a rel=canonical to the already existing pages? So basically (I know this HTML isn't right, it's just for visual's sake!): www.eteach.com/international/how-to-become-a-teacher rel=canonical --> www.eteach.com/how-to-become-a-teacher I understand this gives all the authority to the original page, not the international one, but I'm fine with that (unless anyone can suggest anything else?)
International SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Naming URL for Russian version of the site
Hi, Our site has two languages: English and Russian. My question is that should I use Cyrillic letters in the URL structure and file naming of the Russian version of the site, as Russian users are searching for information by using Russian words not English words? Thanks in advance, Sam
International SEO | | Awaraman0 -
GeoIP and redirects
I have been looking at an ecommerce site that uses a GeoIP module to take users to the relevant store, eg: domain.com/uk domain.com/us
International SEO | | edwardlewis
domain.com/euro
domain.com/row After using the SEO Moz site crawler, the GeoIP module is using 302 redirects to take users to the relevant page. So, domain.com 302s to domain.com/uk and so on. What is the impact of this in terms of SEO? Only the US version of the site was crawled by the site crawler, presumably because this was due to the US version of the site being shown based on the IP address. Links to the other stores are clearly placed in the header of the site but they weren't crawled. Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
Multi-lingual SEO: Country-specific TLD's, or migration to a huge .com site?
Dear SEOmoz team, I’m an in-house SEO looking after a number of sites in a competitive vertical. Right now we have our core example.com site translated into over thirty different languages, with each one sitting on its own country-specific TLD (so example.de, example.jp, example.es, example.co.kr etc…). Though we’re using a template system so that changes to the .com domain propagate across all languages, over the years things have become more complex in quite a few areas. For example, the level of analytics script hacks and filters we have created in order to channel users through to each language profile is now bordering on the epic. For a number of reasons we’ve recently been discussing the cost/benefit of migrating all of these languages into the single example.com domain. On first look this would appear to simplify things greatly; however I’m nervous about what effect this would have on our organic SE traffic. All these separate sites have cumulatively received years of on/off-site work, and even if we went through the process of setting up page-for-page redirects to their new home on example.com, I would hate to lose all this hard-work (and business) if we saw our rankings tank as a result of the move. So I guess the question is, for an international business such as ours, which is the optimal site structure in the eyes of the search engines; Local sites on local TLD’s, or one mammoth site with language identifiers in the URL path (or subdomains)? Is Google still so reliant on TLD for geo targeting search results, or is it less of a factor in today’s search engine environment? Cheers!
International SEO | | linklater0