Is 302 Redirect a bad thing in SEO terms?
-
I am getting a lot of "302 (Temporary Redirects) = True" on many of my product URL's. What does it mean? Is it a bad thing to get these redirects? And how to fix them?
Thanks.
-
Thanks to all responders,
I am new to this community, and I greatly appreciate all your help. My question has fully been answered.
Thanks.
-
@Joe This is the longest reply I have ever seen. I didn't read it, but I am giving you a thumbs up just for writing it. You can always post a link to the article.
-
I don't think 302's will hurt your rankings. But you could potentially be (and likely are) wasting link juice which would help your rankings.
Think of it like this...are you hurting your presentation by not using eye catching, memorable graphs and charts? No...But you could potentially make your presentation better by adding these things.
It's about potential, not right/wrong...You're not doing something wrong by using 302's, i.e. you won't get penalized for it. But, all things being equal, 9/10 your competitor whose using 301's will outrank you.
My general rule of thumb is if I can be doing something that could likely help me, then I do it. It's much easier on the mind.
The way you fix them depends on how they were setup. Were they setup through manual htaccess modifications, a plugin, a tool in CPanel or some other hosting platform, etc?
I would suggest changing them them the same way they were created to prevent confusion, redirect loops, etc.
-
302 redirect (temporary) passes no link juice. 301 redirect (permanent) passes 90 - 99% link juice value.
Fixing it will require you to check the documentation or contact the company supporting it. This problem is fairly common still and some software has workarounds. This may take some research.
-
Thanks, Great response, but I am not sure if it answers my question. When I received my Issues report from the Crawl conducted by SEOmoz on my web site I got more tham 1000 rows showing up with 302 redirects. Does it count negatively towards getting a good ranking or should I just ignore it. And if I need to fix it how do I fix it? My web site is hosted by a Shopping Cart style company and I do not have any control over internal coding.
Thanks.
-
I really like Matt's response...
SEO advice: discussing 302 redirects
by Matt Cutts on <abbr class="published" title="2006-01-04">January 4, 2006</abbr>
in Google/SEO
In a previous post I talked a little bit about 302s. Let’s cover them in more detail. A 302 redirect can be on-domain or off-domain. On-domain is simple and not prone to hijacking, so let’s talk about that first. Suppose you go to www.xbox.com and the site does a 302 redirect to some really long url, or a url with a session ID (this used to be what xbox.com did a couple years ago. Now you end up at e.g. www.xbox.com/en-US/, but play along with me). Would you rather see www.xbox.com or www.xbox.com/home/redir/sess?session=23412341234124124231455423633 ? Yeah, I’d rather see just www.xbox.com too. That’s why for on-domain 302 redirects (that is, a redirect in which both the source page and the destination page are both on the same domain), search engines will usually pick the shorter url. Hopefully that makes sense. I’d rather see www.example.com than www.example.com/deep/home/page?last=root&sessid=909345AF2343 , and I think most people would too.
Q: Time out. I’ve got a question. What’s the deal with 302 vs. 301? What does that mean? What’s the difference?
A: The “302″ refers to the HTTP status codes that are returned to your browser when you request a page. For example, a 404 page is called a “404″ because web servers return a status code of 404 to indicate that a requested page wasn’t found. The difference between a 301 and a 302 is that a 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location, while a 302 status code means that a page has temporarily moved to a new location. For example, if you try to fetch a page http://example.com/ and the web server says “That’s a 301. The new location is http://www.example.com/” then the web server is saying “That url you requested? It’s moved permanently to the new location I’m giving you.”Okay, back to our regular discussion. Now let’s talk about off-domain 302 redirects. By definition, those are redirects from one domain A.com to another domain B.com that are claimed to be temporary; that is, the web server on A.com could always change its mind and start showing content on A.com again. The vast majority of the time that a search engine receives an off-domain 302 redirect, the right thing to do is to crawl/index/return the destination page (in the example we mentioned, it would be B.com). In fact, if you did that 100% of the time, you would never have to worry about “hijacking”; that is, content from B.com returned with an A.com url. Google is moving to a set of heuristics that return the destination page more than 99% of the time. Why not 100% of the time? Most search engine reserve the right to make exceptions when we think the source page will be better for users, even though we’ll only do that rarely.
Let’s take an example from the tiny fraction of the time that we may reserve the right to show the source page for a 302 off-domain redirect. If you run wget on www.sfgiants.com, you’ll get a 302 redirect to a different domain, and the url that you’ll get is pretty ugly: http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf . Please set aside that you are probably a site owner or webmaster for a second, and try to step into the shoes of a regular user on the street. If we had a taste test, how many users would prefer to click on “sfgiants.com” and how many would prefer to click on “sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf” ? Normal users usually like short, clean urls. They are less likely to say “mlb.com? I wonder what that stands for? Hmm. Maybe major league baseball? Is that the officially licensed name, I wonder? It probably is. Yes, it looks like sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf is the correct url from my query.”
Now you see the trade-offs. Go with the destination 100% of the time and you’ll get some ugly urls (but never any hijacking). On the other hand, if you sometimes return the source url you can show nicer urls (but with the possibility of source pages showing up when they shouldn’t). Different search engines have different policies that have evolved over time. Over the last year, Google has moved much more toward going with the destination url, for example, and the infrastructure in Bigdaddy continues in this direction.
Let’s take a look at how different engines handle the [sf giants] query. Remember that sfgiants.com does a 302 redirect to a url on a different domain (sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf). And remember that reasonable people can disagree on which url should show up at #1. I’m not trying to criticize any search engine here, but rather trying to point out that this is a weird corner case.
Current Google behavior: we return sfgiants.com at #1. But we also return http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sf/homepage/sf_homepage.jsp at #3, as an uncrawled url, which is definitely poor/suboptimal.
Current Ask behavior: Ask returns giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sf/homepage/sf_homepage.jsp at #1, sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf at #2, and sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sf/homepage/sf_homepage.jsp at #3.
Current MSN behavior: MSN returns giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sf/homepage/sf_homepage.jsp at #1 and sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf at #2.
Current Yahoo! behavior: Yahoo! returns www.sfgiants.com at #1, but also returns sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf at #6. You might think that returning sfgiants.com at #1 isn’t what Yahoo! said that they would do with 302 off-domain redirects (i.e. always go with the destination), but if you read carefully, Yahoo! also reserves the right to make exceptions in handling redirects. That allows them to show a nice url at #1.
Current Google Bigdaddy behavior (data center at 64.233.179.104): Bigdaddy managed to find a short url on the destination domain of mlb.com, namely giants.mlb.com, and returns that. We return it at #1 with no other duplicate urls on the first page.
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
-
How do I carry out a redirect? Is there a code I need to use?
How do I carry out a redirect? Is there a code I need to use? Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | laurentjb0 -
SERP Hijacking/Content Theft/ 302 Redirect?
Sorry for the second post, thought this should have it's own. Here is the problem I am facing amongst many others. Let's take the search term "Air Jordan Release Dates 2017" and place it into Google Search. Here is a link:
On-Page Optimization | | SneakerFiles
https://www.google.com/#q=air+jordan+release+dates+2017 Towards the bottom of the page, you will see a website that has SneakerFiles (my website) in the title. The exact title is: Air Jordan Release Dates 2016, 2017 | SneakerFiles - Osce Now, this is my content, but not my website. For some reason, Google thinks this is my site. If you click on the link in search, it automatically redirects you to another page (maybe 302 redirect), but in the cache you can see it's mine:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qrVEUDE1t48J:www.osce.gob.pe/take_p_firm.asp%3F+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us I have blocked the websites IP, disallowed my style.css to be used so it just shows a links without the style, still nothing. I have submitted multiple google spam reports as well as feedback from search. At times, my page will return to the search but it gets replaced by this website. I even filed a DMCA with Google, they declined it. I reached out to their Host and Domain register multiple times, never got a response. The sad part about this, it's happening for other keywords, for example if you search "KD 9 Colorways", the first result is for my website but on another domain name (my website does rank 3rd for a different Tag page). The page I worked hard on keeping up to date. I did notice this bit of javascript from the cloaked/hacked/serp hijacking website: I disabled iFrames...(think this helps) so not sure how they are doing this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Note: I am using Wordpress if that means anything.0 -
Search by popular terms
This may be a simple question and possibly already answered to death - but I think i'm not asking or googling the right question so I haven't been able to get a good answer for it. Some websites have a feature at the bottom of their page where one can "search by popular terms", consisting of keywords linked to the search result of that term. Some websites do this: http://www.kogan.com/au/search-terms/ This must be obviously an optimisation technique, but how does this benefit ranking? Are there any down sides to this? Is this still a current good practice?
On-Page Optimization | | central60 -
Please review page for on page SEO
I'm working on an adult dating site review blog and am hoping to build links to the category pages. It's a wordpress blog so the posts are categorised by topics. However can you tell me if there is enough content on the page for google to identify what the page is about? The problem is that the content of each category pages is pulled from the posts. What I think is needed is some static text on the page 2-300 words that use the keyword. Here's an example of a page targeting the keywords 'online dating'. http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/category/online-dating/
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK
[editor's note -- thumbnails on site may not be appropriate for some workplaces] Will the page rank like this if there are a good amount of authorative links or does the page itself need work?0 -
Things to put in your page Title
Hello! I have a wordpress based blog/website and I was wondering what were the most important things to put in my title. I'm a wedding photographer. I think the location of the shoot is important and the fact that it's wedding photography, but is it important to try and put my company name (Celynnen Photography) in it too?! It's very hard to keep the titles short! Ioan
On-Page Optimization | | IoanSaid0 -
Redirect a blog category page to the homepage?
Hi folks Following Penguin 1.1, I have a client site at number 5 for their primary keyword. (was creeping up page 2 with whitehat link building and tight on-site SEO.) However now the page ranking at No. 5 is for a blog category archive. What do people think the quickest / safest way to get this ranking directed back to the homepage is? Many thanks Simon
On-Page Optimization | | SCL-SEO0 -
SEO for standard website pages
How do you folks approach adding some SEO value to the standard "every site has them" pages like "About Us", "Contact Us" and such? I struggle trying to find some relevant non-branded content. We normally cover all the customers relevant services and product offerings in pages specfiically tailored to that content, but don't want to waste pages if they could have some value in drawing traffic. Any great ideas, Mozworld? Thanks, Mark
On-Page Optimization | | DenverKelly0 -
Hotspot area for SEO
Hi, we have an online store: http://www.redwrappings.com.au/ There's been a debate regarding which area is recognised to be the most important place/hotspot for SEO: Free delivery van area (top left panel) OR Top menu navigation Given that if you look at the page html source code, the top navigation loads last and the free delivery fan area is the first one to be read in the html source code. We did this because we want the body page content (h1 & text content) to be read first by search engine robot & also the body can load faster for the user. Is this the right thing to do or we better off load the top navigation first? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Essentia0