302 a Homepage?
-
I am working with a site that wants to temporarily show a promotional landing page instead of their homepage. Theoretically you could do a 302, but what are the SEO implications of doing such a thing? I would appreciate any first hand experience or feedback on the idea. Ultimately it will not be my decision, but I do have influence.
As a side note, there homepage is a mess (visually displeasing) and they really need a new website. This is one of the reasons that they are leaning this way.
Thanks in advance for the feedback.
-
I have a similar situation. I've run an A/B test that indicates that the existing home page (let's call this A) doesn't convert as well as a deeper page (call it B), even for visitors who have seen no other pages on the site.
Until the new home page (A) is ready, I want to take advantage of the immediate gains available by redirecting traffic, in the short term, to B.
I'm confident that 302 is the "correct" way of doing this, since the redirect is temporary, but I'm spooked about how Google will treat this.
Matt, both A and B are already indexed, and both will remain "live" after the permanent fix is in place. Would you still have concerns about a 302?
-
I don't have a lot of experience using 302 redirects as usually a 301 was the best way to go with. But in this case I'd say that the 302 is indeed a bit too much for what you want to do. I would go with the suggestion above as well and temporarily replace the homepage just with the new landing page that you'd like to set up to make sure people will get that one.
-
Never, ever use a 302. People can disagree with me, but I have seen issues with how Google treats the 302s. If you read the technical specifications on what a 302 is for, your example is a good use case. The reality of how Google treats the URL is that you end up with 2 URLs indexed and then the new URL will stay indexed when you remove the 302. It just ends up as a big mess.
Why not just show the new landing page design on the home page show a 200? Just switch out the code for the page temporarily? Google will just see the new info on the page, and it may help the old page if it was such a mess. Save the old code and you can always switch it back.
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
-
302 redirects in Magento, trying to fix
Hi all, I'm assigned a site in Magento. After the first craw, we found almost 15k 302 redirects. A sample URL ends with this /stores/store/switch/?SID=qdq9mf1u6afgodo1vtvk0ucdpb&___from_store=default&___store=german&uenc=aHR0cHM6Ly9qdWljeWZsdXRlcy5jb20vP19fX3N0b3JlPWdlcm1hbg%2C%2C And they are currently 302 redirecting to the homepage as well as other main pages and also product pages it seems. Some of these point to account pages where customers log in. Probably best for me to de-index those so no issues there. But I'm worried about the 302 redirects to public pages. The extension we have installed is SEO Suite Ultimate by MageWorx. Does anyone here have experience here specifically and how did you fix it? Thanks, JC
Technical SEO | | LASClients0 -
Homepage name in Breadcrumb for schema.org
Hi all, We have recently implemented the schema.org structure for our breadcrumbs. In our breadcrumb we include a link to the homepage. Since implementation I'm receiving the following error in Google Search Console: Either "name" or "item.name" should be specified The error is being triggered because we don't have itemprop="name" defined for the homepage on each page. Our breadcrumbs look good in search but I'm wondering if anybody else has experienced this error and what can we do to fix it. Should itemprop="name" be our Brand name? Or should we define this as our root domain? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Brando160 -
Swapping Homepages in WordPress
Hi, Th situation is: I've cloned my homepage & added new content to the cloned page I've then updated the WordPress settings to make the cloned page the new homepage Will I lose PA as the new cloned page is in effect a new article?
Technical SEO | | jasongmcmahon0 -
Google didn't show my correct language-version homepage.
I have a website which serves two languages - English and Chinese. My English homepage can be indexed by Google. But when I search the brand term in English, Google returns my Chinese homepage. I already added the hreflang attributes. And I'm working on building the XML sitemap for three languages. What other things I can work on to fix the issue? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jsteimle0 -
Homepage not indexed
Hi, I have a problem with my website. From my PC, when I search for site:nobelcom.com the homepage of the website doesn't appear, but on other PCs (different IPs) it is ok.
Technical SEO | | Silviu
Also any keywords that usually responded with homepage, now responds with other page. Does anyone know way this is happening. It happen before the Penguin update, and after a fetch like google and send to index, I had the homepage back on serps0 -
What to do with a 302 redirect after a while
Hi guys, A client of ours has a website with a very bad linkprofile. We adressed this issue and we migrated the website to another domain. We redirected the bad website (cornelisbedding.be) to the new domain (cornelisbedding.com) with a 302 redirect. We didn't want to pass the bad link juice. The problem we are having now is that we can't afford to lose the redirect on cornelisbedding.be. We would lose to much traffic because the old domain still has alot of links that generate good quality traffic. I have read that Google will treat 302 redirects as 301's in the long run. We really want to avoid this.
Technical SEO | | Jacobe
We were thinking of using a meta refresh with a delay on, but in Google's eyes that would be considered spammy. Are their any other suggestions on how to handle this? Thanks you!0 -
Having trouble removing homepage from google
For various reasons my client wants their homepage removed from google, no just the content of the page off but the page not to be indexed (yep strange request but we are mere service providers) today I requested in webmaster tool that default.asp was removed. Wht says done but the sites homepage is still listed. The page also has a no index tag on but 24 hours and 18k Google bot hits later it still remains. Anyone got any other suggestions to deindex just the homepage asap please
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
We're working on a site that is a beer company. Because it is required to have an age verification page, how should we best redirect the bots (useragents) to the actual homepage (thus skipping ahead of the age verification without allowing all browsers)?
This question is about useragents and alcohol sites that have an age verification screen upon landing on the site.
Technical SEO | | OveritMedia0