All pages going through 302 redirect - bad?
-
So, our web development company did something I don't agree with and I need a second opinion.
Most of our pages are statically cached (the CMS creates .html files), which is required because of our traffic volume. To get geotargeting to work, they've set up every page to 302 redirect to a geodetection script, and back to the geotargeted version of the page.
Eg: www.example.com/category 302 redirects to www.example.com/geodetect.hp?ip=ip_address. Then that page 302 redirects back to either www.example.com/category, or www.example.com/geo/category for the geo-targeted version.
**So all of our pages - thousands - go through a double 302 redirect. It's fairly invisible to the user, and 302 is more appropriate than 301 in this case, but it really worries me. I've done lots of research and can't find anything specifically saying this is bad, but I can't imagine Google being happy with this. **
Thoughts? Is this bad for SEO? Is there a better way (keeping in mind all of our files are statically generated)? Is this perfectly fine?
-
I would think there has to be a better way to do that. Sites detect IP addresses and deliver dynamically created local content all the time. I would think there are some scripts out there which would do what you want without all the 302 redirects. It would be cleaner and better SEO. Unfortunately, I'm not a developer and don't have a specific suggestion, but I'm sure there's a better solution.
-
If you can prevent the redirects then I would definitely choose for this option, I'm not a big fan of redirects because there will always be some damage in the authority that is passed on.
-
This is what I've been struggling with. It's not a link-juice issue, and the page hasn't moved. We're just showing a slightly different version of the page based on where you are coming from. So even though www.example.com/category and www.example.com/geo/category both exist, www.example.com/category is the canonical URL and we don't want the /geo version indexed (because it's essentially duplicate content).
So from a technical perspective, it's essentially being used correctly. My concern is that when google suddenly sees thousands of pages double 302 redirecting, some kind of red flag will go up and we'll be penalized.
-
it's only bad if you want those pages to get ranked and there are links (internal or external) pointing to the referring URLs.
In other words, 302 redirects do not pass link juice as a 301 does. Unless you are no-indexing these pages anyway, it's just not a good idea. If it were me I'd wonder why we were using 302s at all? I've only ever used one once and that was because I didn't want the blackhat-SEO links coming over to the new domain... But this is a different case.
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
-
Do home page carry more seo benefit than other pages?
hi, i would like to include my kws in the URL and they are under 50 characters. is there anything in the algo that tells engines to give more importance to homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | alan-shultis0 -
How to redirect 301 from high authority sites to own website?
How to redirect 301 from high authority sites to own website? If anyone know can tell me, such gigs are selling on the Fiverr.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jefjaa0 -
Moving content form Non-performing site to performing site - wihtout 301 Redirection
I have 2 different websites: one have good amount of traffic and another have No Traffic at all. I have a website that has lots of valuable content But no traffic. And I want to move the content of non-performing site to performing site. (Don't want to redirect) My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to "noindex" on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the performing domain to be indexed again. So, I was wondering If it will create any copied content issue or not? What should i have to take care of when I am going to move content from one site to another?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Hacked Websites (Doorways) Ranking First Page of Google
Hello Moz community! I could really use your help with some suggestions here with some recent changes I've noticed in the Google serps for terms I've been currently working on. Currently one of the projects I am working on is for an online pharmacy and noticed that the SERPs are being now taken up by hacked websites which look like doorways to 301 redirect to an online pharmacy the hacker wants the traffic to go to. Seems like they may be wordpress sites that are hacked and have unrelated content on their websites compared to online pharmacies. We've submitted these issues as spam to Google and within chrome as well but haven't heard back. When searching terms like "Canadian Pharmacy Viagra" and other similar terms we see this issue. Any other recommendations on how we can fix this issue? Thanks for your time and attached is a screenshot of the results we are seeing for one of our searches. 1Orus
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | monarkg0 -
Why isn't a 301 redirect removing old style URLs from Google's index?
I have two questions:1 - We changed the URL structure of our site. Old URLs were in the format of kiwiforsale.com/used_fruit/yummy_kiwi. These URLs are 301 redirected to kiwiforsale.com/used-fruit/yummy-kiwi. We are getting duplicate content errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Why isn't the 301 redirect removing the old style URL out of Google's index?2 - I tried to remove the old style URL at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals, however I got the message that "We think the image or web page you're trying to remove hasn't been removed by the site owner. Before Google can remove it from our search results, the site owner needs to take down or update the content."Why are we getting this message? Doesn't the 301 redirect alert Google that the old style URL is toast and it's gone?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Index page de-indexed / banned ?
Yesterday google removed our index page from the results. Today they also removed language subdomains (fr.domain.com).. Index page, subdomains are not indexed anymore. Any suggestions? -- No messages in GWT. No malware. Backlink diversification was started in May. Never penguilized or pandalized. Last week had the record of all times of daily UV. Other pages still indexed and driving traffic, left around 40% of total. Never used any black SEO tool. 95% of backlinks are related; sidebar, footer links No changes made of index page for couple months.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bele0 -
HOW TO: City Targeted Landing Pages For Lead Generation
Hi guys, So one of my clients runs a web development agency in San Diego and for lead generation purposes we are thinking of creating him city targeted landing pages which will all be on different domains ie. lawebdesginstudio / sfwebdesigngurus I plan to register these 20-30 domains for my client and load them all up on a my single linux server I have from godaddy. I noticed however today using google's keyword tool that roughly only 5-10 cities have real traffic worth trying to capture to turn into leads. Therefore I am not sure if its even worth building those extra 20 landing pages since they will receive very little traffic. My only thought is, if I do decide to build all 30 landing pages, then I assume I will have a very strong private network of authority websites that I can use to point to the clients website. I mean I figure I can rank almost all of them page 1 top 5 within 2-3 months. My question is: 1. Do city targeted micro sites for the purpose of lead generation still work? If so are there any threads that have more info on this topic? 2. Do you suggest I interlink all 30 sites together and perhaps point them all to the money site? If so i'm wondering if I should diversify the ip's that I used to register the domains as well as the whois info. Thanks guys, all help is appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AM2130 -
Using Redirects To Avoid Penalties
A quick question, born out of frustration! If a webpage has been penalised for unnatural links, what would be the effects of moving that page to a new URL and setting up a 301 redirect from the old penalised page to the new page? Will Google treat the new page as ‘non-penalised’ and restore your rankings? It really shouldn’t work, but I’m convinced (although not certain) that our clients competitor has done this, with great effect! I suppose you could also achieve this using canonicalisation too! Many thanks in advance, Lee.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webpresence0