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
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
-
301 redirecting a site that currently links to the target site
I have a personal blog that has a good amount of back links pointing at it from high quality relevant authoritative sites in my niche. I also run a company in the same niche. I link to a page on the company site from the personal blog article that has bunch of relevant links pointing at it (as it's highly relevant to the content on the personal blog). Overview: Relevant personal blog post has a bunch of relevant external links pointing at it (completely organic). Relevant personal blog post then links (externally) to relevant company site page and is helping that page rank. Question: If I do the work to 301 the personal blog to the company site, and then link internally from the blog page to the other relevant company page, will this kill that back link or will the internal link help as much as the current external link does currently? **For clarity: ** External sites => External blog => External link to company page VS External sites => External blog 301 => Blog page (now on company blog) => Internal link to target page I would love to hear from anyone that has performed this in the past 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Keyword_NotProvided0 -
How to get rid of two 301 redirects?
I have two 301s from http://www. to https://non-www version of my site. I wonder how can get rid of one so it will look like this: 301-200 instead of 301-301-200 All other combinations work fine and give me 301-200 status codes. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lovemozforever0 -
Setting up 301 Redirects after acquisition?
Hello! The company that I work for has recently acquired two other companies. I was wondering what the best strategy would be as it relates to redirects / authority. Please help! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colin.Accela0 -
Should You Use 301 Redirects When Switching To A Secure SSL Server?
Hi, our client has switched from a non-secure server to a secure (SSL) server.. but the non secure pages still exist, i.e. http://www.stainlesshandrailsystems.co.uk/balustrade-systems.html (non-secure)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webpresence
https://www.stainlesshandrailsystems.co.uk/balustrade-systems.html (secure) We assumed that we should 301 redirect the http pages to the new https pages using the following htaccess rule; RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R,L] HOWEVER! both of the above pages show the same Page Authority (PA) and Pagerank (PR).. does this mean that they are being seen as the same page, do we really need to employ 301 redirects? Many thanks in advance, much appreciated. 🙂 Lee1 -
Effect of 301 redirect to a relative url to homepage?
One of our new clients recently encountered a site-wide ranking drop for many keywords and I'm pretty confident regarding their link profile as to being 98% legit. Background: 1. Client full site is https, and all http pages are 301 redirected to their https counterpart 2. Client has ~50 links partners (all legitimate sites + schools etc) links to client with urls such as www.example.com/portal/123.aspx that redirects to www.example.com. 3. Client homepage 301 redirects from www.example.com to www.example.com/default.aspx and then 301 redirects to the relative url "/Home.aspx". 4. Client launched some testing with Google website optimizer tool. ~1-2 months ago. Symptoms: 1. Rankings dropped for basically many/all 30-40+ keywords by ~15 positions 2. Seomoz reports close to a double of existing pages + (600+) duplicate content in the same date range. Webmasters only report 80 duplicate titles though. 3. Domain authority by seomoz reduced a bit + backlinks recorded by seomoz to the website nearly halved in the past 2 months. I'm not sure if I narrowed this towards the right direction, and it isn't clear when the relative url 301 redirect was implemented: 1. The 301 redirect to the relative page (www.example.com/default.aspx to "/home.aspx") is accounting for the loss of links recorded by seomoz. 2. The ~50 links the client currently use (www.example.com/portal.123.aspx 301 redirecting to www.example.com, also relative) as a tracking tool is being considered 301 redirect abuse. 3. Maybe something went wrong with the usage of google optimizer tool for SEO purposes? Visitor traffic to each of the tested pages looked fine. I would greatly appreciate any advice/insights on what I might be missing in terms of direction / factors. Thanks! Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sixspokemedia0 -
Where is the best place for Landing Pages to reside on the Home Page?
On this site http://www.austintenantadvisors.com/ I have my main landing pages listed in the navigation under "Types". The reason why I did this is because I am not sure where to insert those on the home page where it does not look spammy to Google and looks natural for users. Obviously they need to appear somewhere on the home page for Google to be able to continue crawling and indexing them. Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Canonical or 301 redirect, that is the question?
So my site has duplicate content issues because of the index.html and the www and non www version of the site. What's the best way to deal with this without htaccess? Is it a 301 redirect or is it the canonical, or is it both?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Is it better to link to the root domain or to the language home page?
Hi guys! When dealing with linkbuilding for a multi language page such as www.inmonova.com is it better to get external links pointing at inmonova.com or is it better to point: English links to inmonova.com/en Spanish links to inmonova.com/es German links to inmonova.com/de What is your opinion?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inmonova0