Have a problem with our home page. Is temporary 301 redirect an option?
-
Hey Mozers,
I discovered this morning that the home page for my website is rendering fine in Chrome and Firefox, but very poorly in IE. My analytics show that over 50% of my visitors are using IE. As a result of the problem, IE has a bounce rate 32% higher than other browsers.
I'm not a web developer and I'm fairly new to SEO, so I'm guessing that it's going to take me at least a couple days to get it fixed. In the meantime, I was considering doing a 301 redirect from the home page to the largest category page in hopes of keeping some of the IE users from bouncing while I get the home page sorted out.
Would there be any long term negative effects from this once I get the page sorted out and take the 301 off it? Are there any other solutions that would be better?
Thanks for the help!
-
The real questoin is : if you think your category page converts better than your homepage - why do have a homepage at all?
-
Thanks Matt. Glad to have helped
-
Thanks guys! I'm glad I asked. You guys rock!
-
That pretty much covers it.
Matt, if you do decide to implement such a redirect as you describe, absolutely make sure that it's a 302 redirect, not a 301 Redirect. 301's are permanent (as in the message a 301 gives to search bots), 302's are temporary.
As Sebes says though, your best bet is to not redirect your homepage. As you say it will take you a couple of days to fix the browser issue, maybe slightly longer, it won't make much difference from your current situation if you just leave the homepage as it is until it's resolved. Better to be safe in the medium & long-term rather than the very short term and risk harming your site by redirecting your homepage.
Regards
Simon
-
Short answer: DONT!
Repair the glitch even if it is a little bit longer. Let me phrase it this way: "redirects are serious business" and not for html problems.
More on redirects and statuscodes: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/http-status-codes and http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
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
-
To remove or not remove a redirected page from index
We have a promotion landing page which earned some valuable inbound links. Now that the promotion is over, we have redirected this page to a current "evergreen" page. But in the search results page on Google, the original promotion landing page is still showing as a top result. When clicked, it properly redirects to the newer evergreen page. But, it's a bit problematic for the original promo page to show in the search results because the snippet mentions specifics of the promo which is no longer active. So, I'm wondering what would be the net impact of using the "removal request " tool for the original page in GSC. If we don't use that tool, what kind of timing might we expect before the original page drops out of the results in favor of the new redirected page? And if we do use the removal tool on the original page, will that negate what we are attempting to do by redirecting to the new page, with regard to preserving inbound link equity?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoelevated0 -
Java redirect harm page authority?
Hello! Our website using JAVA redirect (legal reasons) , I noticed that pages that have JS redirect don't get the same page authority for example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Roi.Bar
The old home page have 60 PA while the new home page get only 22 PA I know that Google don't have problem with JS redirects and they passing all the juice like regular 301
but all SEO tools are straggling to understand it, why? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?0 -
Client would like to 301 redirect the homepage to a category page
Hello MOZ Community!!! I would like your expert opinions on a scenario, please! My client is an ecommerce company, and currently has one of its category pages outranking its homepage for a few key phrases. The homepage, however, has a better conversion rate. So, the client is asking that we make the homepage the category URL, so http://www.theirsite.com/blue-clothes. The existing homepage URL - http://www.theirsite.com - would 301 REDIRECT to the category page - which would render the current version of the homepage. Therefore, there would be nothing, ZERO content, on the MAIN URL: http://www.theirsite.com Has anyone ever done this before? What are the pros and the cons of this practice? Here is my same client, for reference: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/issue-with-category-ranking-on-page-1-vs-homepage-ranking-on-page-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Do I redirect pages that no longer appear on the website?
Here is an example of the link that is no longer on the website (Broken link) http://www.weddingrings.com/item.cfm?str_shortdesc=UNIQUE The broken link was fixed to : http://www.weddingrings.com/item.cfm?str_shortdesc=UNIQUE CARRE CUT DIAMOND ETERNITY BAND&str_category=Diamond-Bands-and-Gold-Rings&grouping_id=9&category_id=21&int_item_id=6884 Would I still need to redirect the old broken link to the new fixed one using 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexkatalkin0 -
301 redirect a old site that has been "dead" for a while?
Hi guys, A quick question. I have a client who has an old business website that had some great links (Forbes.com, CocaCola.com, etc). The problem is that he knew nothing about SEO and let the hosting expire. He still owns the domain, but the site is no longer listed in Google. He did no SEO, so I am not worried about being hit by any artificial anchor text penalties, since the links are as natural as it gets. So my questions is, would there be any benefit from 301 redirecting that site to his new business? The new business is in almost exactly the same niche as the old site. I am thinking of 301'ing to a sub-page which will refer to his past venture with the old business, not to the homepage of the new site. Thanks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
301 Redirecting multiple domains to brand new domain
Hi guys, I have read quite a bit of stuff on 301 redirects after Penguin. Hoping someone could help me out. im looking at a way to do a legit 301 redirect without passing the penalty. I have acquired two businesses, business1 and business2, that both had websites that were hit by penguin. Ive anaylsed there backlinks and theres a lot of spammy forum links and comments and I was also informed they were both using buildmyrank. A side note, buiness2 only started using BMR after it noticed business1 have large amounts of high PR links. business1.com was ranking at position 1 till the penguin hit. Business2.com was ranking around page 2 I work in the same arena as these two businesses and didnt generate any business via the internet. When these 2 businesses failed (due to loss of rankings and traffic) i decided to take them over. What I am thinking of doing is 301'ing both business domains to my brand new, zero links, domain which will be the name of my new company. I will combine the content from both sites, around 1000 pages, in to the new one. So my question is, does 301'ing multiple domains, that target the same keywords, and operate in the same niche, look less "spammy" then 301'ing 1 domain? I'm trying to look at it in the eyes of google. It is a legit merging of businesses. Thanks for your help, really appreciate your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
301 redirect
I have 2 websites, lets call them Website A and Website B. Website A is a commercial website, website B is a 7 years old blog. Website B has many natural, high quality BL, including some from Nytimes, etc. I want to integrate the blog (B) into the commercial website (A). The idea behind this thought is to compress the two websites, it is easier to have everything in one place. I will do this with 301 redirect via Webmaster tools, htaccess etc. The uRL structure will remain the same: eg: websiteB/post-title/ -> websiteA/post title What will happen with my quality BLs? Is there any chance to be penalized by Google? What will happen with the PR of the 2 sites? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasmin281 -
Home page deindexed by goole, How to determine why and how to fix
On Wednesday I noticed our domain was no longer ranking for our key word and our product Isolator Fitness, http://isolatorfitness.com, I have been researching and not finding answers to why it happened and what to do to fix it. We have about 800 other pages still listed. I am new to all this seo stuff, can anyone guide me in the right direction.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David75
History about 10 days a go I went google web master tools and noticed that there were a large number of errors due to the fact the robots could not crawl our site. Looked at the site and found that Privacy button on WP was turned to block robots. I turned it on and had google re crawl the site, looked like google was not able to crawl the site for about 3 months, on Monday I did a 301 redirect to on of our other sites for another product we sell, to http://isolatorfitness.com/6-pack-bags. This site had a good bit of back links would doing all this at one time cause this How do I determine if we did anything wrong Thanks0