Hey Arun,

Thanks for posting! I was beginning to think that I was the only Inbound guy anywhere that had to deal with this kind of issue

Yup, I created the same bug with redirect loops trying to get around the slash issue. The problem is that S3 doesn't consider the slash as part of the rewrite data unless something comes after it.

Ultimately, my number one suggestion would be to go with a different service that allows you to install a Server App like Nginx or Apache. Others have agreed that redirections set up through a server app are the way that they feel the most comfortable that link equity is being passed.

If you're dead-set on S3, which I would understand as the load times are crazy-awesome-insane, I may have a solution for you soon. Our dev team is working on a script for Jekyll + S3 sites that will essentially create extension-less files (i.e. example.com/contact) that contain meta refresh + rel canon.

The script will use a list of desired redirections + rules that is structured the same way an htaccess file would be. I can't speak to how it will get past S3's default 302ing yet, but I know that it will use CURL. Look for a YouMoz post soon from me!

Anyways, I hope my notes here help! I'm gonna try and make that post soon after the script is created. Just as a last note, in taking a look at your site I noticed that a lot of the internal links on your homepage don't have the trailing slash in them. I would definitely start there and add those slashes, and perform a "submit page + linked page" to Webmaster Tools after!

Hey all,

Came across a bit of an interesting challenge recently, one that I was hoping some of you might have had experience with!

We're currently in the process of a website rebuild, for which I'm really excited. The new site is using Markdown to create an entirely static site. Load-times are fantastic, and the code is clean. Life is good, apart from the 302s.

One of the weird quirks I've realized is that with oldschool, non-server-generated page content is that every page of the site is an Index.html file in a directory. The resulting in a www.website.com/page-title will 302 to www.website.com/page-title/.

My solution off the bat has been to just be super diligent and try to stay on top of the link profile and send lots of helpful emails to the staff reminding them about how to build links, but I know that even the best laid plans often fail.

Has anyone had a similar challenge with a static site and found a way to overcome it?

Thanks all,

I think the problem is coming from the fact that we're hosted on Amazon Webservices, and the devs are using the "aws bucket config" settings to institute redirects instead of htaccess. SEO vs Dev Battle time.

Follow-up answer:

Our new website (Strutta.com) is entirely static, hosted on S3. No Apache, just straight HTML files. No apache means no htaccess.

Instead of using htaccess, we have to use the S3 Console: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-page-redirect.html

As far as I can tell, this sets up redirects the same way. Although this doesn't answer my initial question, I'm going to try using the control panel later on today to see if 301ing the directories there to include the / will get recognized before whatever is causing the 302 currently

Hey all,

Recently launched a new site on S3, and old pages that I haven't been able to redirect yet are showing up as 403s instead of 404s.

Is a 403 worse than a 404? They're both just basically dead-ends, right? (I have read the status code guides, yes.)