Site Redesign: 302 Query
-
Hi there,
We'll be redesigning our website www.example.com and as such want to 302 users from www.example.com and all other pages to a new URL www.example.com/landingpage while we go through the redesign. The new landing page will have copy and a sign up form on it and once the redesign is completed, we plan on removing the 302 and sending all traffic back to the original url www.example.com.
I'd just like to check that a 302 is the most relevant option here? Obviously, once redesign is completed we'll 301 any old URLs to their new locations once completed.
-
Hemblem,
Although you're redesigning the site, I actually don't recommend using a 302 redirect during the 'redesign' process, as it can have disastrous effects on search engine rankings. I would prefer that you keep the current website up and running: and then 301 redirecting the appropriate pages when the site is ready to go live.
I realize that you want to do, but I have seen too many websites have problems getting things straightened out with the search engines to do what you're suggesting.
-
Is there a reason you don't want the existing site to be available to users while the redesign is going on? the usual process in this kind of situation is to leave the current site alone, and built the redesign site on a dev subdomain which you block from the search engines via password or IP exclusions. Then when the redesign is done, you promote the dev version to live with all the new 301 redirects already in place.
An alternative, if the site won't be out of commission for very long, is to have the site return a 503 server header code. This simply tells the search engines the site is temporarily unavailable and NOT to index anything until the 503 is removed. This ensures that the temporary landing page doesn't get indexed as the new content for the site's pages.
But still, option number 1 is preferable. Would it work in this instance?
Paul
-
It sounds like a temporary redirect so, yes a 302 would be correct. Remember 302's do not pass link juice though.
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
-
Query string category pagination
I've been reading some posts on the merits and pitfalls of using rel=prev, rel=next and canonical, but I just wanted to double check the right solution. example.com/birth-announcements example.com/birth-announcements?p=2 example.com/birth-announcements?p=3 With a small selection of products on each variation. So at the moment there is a canonical on all of them to the base example.com/birth-announcements. The problem is we are having difficulty getting the products within p=* indexed. I don't think from all I read that rel=prev/rel=next is the way to go. Would the solution (or best way to go) be to create a "view-all" filter and set that to be the canonical URL, so all product URLs are in clear focus for Google. The volume of products won't (shouldn't) have too much of an impact on page load. Or am I wrong and rel=prev/rel=next is a feasible solution?
Technical SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Any problem with launching a redesigned site early without a few product categories?
Hello, My client wants to launch a redesign early, problem is they want to do this without a majority of their product pages, since the bulk of their sales aren't from these missing categories, will the resulting 404s hurt them? What is up, is the major pages structured around their primary keyword, most of their sales isn't from the product pages, but from the quotes turned into sales. Big ticket items aren't sold through the cart, they are call or email for quotes and normally those quotes are turned into sales once they realize the price is better. We will be adding these missing categories and products, just one section at a time. Since 404s don't hurt, and we don't rank very well from the products missing, should I be concerned about any thing else? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Google Indexing of Site Map
We recently launched a new site - on June 4th we submitted our site map to google and almost instantly had all 25,000 URL's crawled (yay!). On June 18th, we made some updates to the title & description tags for the majority of pages on our site and added new content to our home page so we submitted a new sitemap. So far the results have been underwhelming and google has indexed a very low number of the updated pages. As a result, only a handful of the new titles and descriptions are showing up on the SERP pages. Any ideas as to why this might be? What are the tricks to having google re-index all of the URLs in a sitemap?
Technical SEO | | Emily_A0 -
Micro-site homepage not being indexed
http://www.reebok.com/en-US/reebokonehome/ This is a homepage for an instructor network micro-site on Reebok.com The robots.txt file was excluding the /en-US/ directory, we've since removed that exclusion, and resubmitted this URL for indexing via Google Webmaster but we are still not seeing it in the index. Any advice would be very helpful, we may be missing some blocking issue or perhaps we just need to wait longer?
Technical SEO | | PatrickDugan0 -
How About Moving My Site to Another Domain?
My website has been hit by a Google Penguin penalty. At this point, it seems very few websites have recovered from this penalty even after it was lifted. That said, I'm still wondering if I should start a new website or my current one to another domain. When I started my website, I registered the domain name http://www.thewebhostinghero.com A few years later, I bought webhostinghero.com as it became available. Actually, webhostinghero.com redirects traffic to thewebhostinghero.com at the registrar level. There are barely any links pointing to webhostinghero.com. TheWebHostingHero.com is quite a big website with over 1400 pages and some very useful tools (http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/free-tools) that took me so long to develop, I just can't believe I'd have to throw it all out the window. So that said, do you think it would be possible to move all or some of the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com? Would that make sense? Would webhostinghero.com come out as a copy of thewebhostinghero.com since the domain is similar, etc.? Of course, moving the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com would have to be done without any 301/302 redirects to avoid passing bad link juice. At the same time, I don't want to end up with duplicate content on both domains.
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Index inactive mobile site?
Hi, I have a question wrt Mobile version of a site. Previously, we had a mobile site which is no longer active and there are possibilities of resurrecting it in future, so we have a 302 redirect which points to the homepage (desktop version). Currently, the mobile site is indexed by the search engines. To avoid the duplicate content issue, is it recommended to use robots.txt and block the spiders from mobile content or apply 301 redirect until the mobile site is up and running, OR continue with the 302 redirect. Any suggestions will be helpful. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | RaksG0 -
One large site or a few microsites?
Hi, I have a client who runs a professional expo company and wants to redo his website. Right now he has one website that has the following sections: expo company info, wedding show info, electrical wire show info, fishing show info. My question is, when I rebuild the site would it be better to do one site or four microsites?
Technical SEO | | JohnWeb120 -
Why did our site drop in Google rankings?
My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0