Using a 301 vs. 302?
-
I'm running into a very confusing situation - and while I think I've worked through the answer, I'm hoping someone can help provide their insight.
I have a client who is in the process of rolling out a responsive site. Because we need to host both Responsive and legacy versions of product pages on the domain we are using the following URL pattern.
New Responsive Product Page
exampleurl.com/product (existing URL structure)
Older Product Pages (redirected to)
exampleurl.com/legacy/product
The rollout will be approximately 2 months to complete. The question becomes - should a 302 redirect be applied from the existing URl to the /legacy/ URLs until the new designs are launched? Given that the timing will be so short this seems reasonable.
Or should a 301 be applied until the new responsive designs are rolled out?
-
Hey Jonathan,
I think the above answers pretty much cover what I'd tell you on this one. I hesitate to ever recommend 302 redirects but it does seem to communicate what is going on. Hopefully by "short time" you mean days and not weeks. Otherwise a 301 might be better if organic traffic is crucial to your business functioning for a month or two++. They effectively do the same thing one just passes link juice more completely.
I'd agree with the idea of using rel=canonical to point at your responsive page from the legacy page to indicate the preferred URL and to avoid duplicate content.
Thanks for the help above all!
Hope that's clear Jonathan.
-
Michael York is right. You should go with 302 redirection. Then after new design you can go with 301 redirection.
-
302 would be perfect for this situation in my opinion.
-
HI Jo I won't redirecting anything. You want the existing url to remain in rankings so:
- duplicate your pages in legacy directory
- put a canonical in domain.com/legacy/product page to domain.com/product so you'll be avoiding dupe issues
- then rollout your new responsive design
- then if the responsive design is the same content (and it should be the same) you can maintain the canonical or if you want to get rid of legacy pages 301 the legacy url to the existing one.
Hope that makes sense.
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
-
What do you use for test rendering your dev site?
I'm redesigning our company ecommerce site and need to test render an infinite scroller to ensure that it is as SEO friendly as possible. My problem is that I cannot view it in Webmaster Tools since I am blocking the site from crawlers using robots.txt. I know I could simply unblock Google temporarily but I really would rather not make my dev site available to search engine crawlers.
Web Design | | bearpaw0 -
Using (duplicate) content in different contexts
I have three distinct hosting products, each solving three different problems. While these three products have different features in terms of functionality, they are all built on the same platform. Now, in terms of marketing some features of the platform, f.ex. High Availability, is significant to all of the products. How do I go about to include information about this feature on all product pages without getting penalized for duplicate content? Is there a way to tell Google that parts of the content on the pages for product 1-3 is duplicated with intent, or duplicated from f.ex. a page that explains the technical aspects of the platform?
Web Design | | SYSE0 -
Text in Images vs. Alt tags
Hi on my homepage i h ave multiple images They have the appropriate alt text for each image, but the text which the image displays is not written into the page and styled using CSS rather than placing text within an image. Is this a issue worth correcting, or is it sufficient to have just alt text for each image. Any major pros from having putting the text in the image into the CMS using appropriate CSS styling to achieve the same effect.
Web Design | | monster990 -
Show root domain (that is 301 redirected) in SERP?
Hi, If I have the domain name www.businessname.com.au pointing (using 301 redirect) to a particular page on a business directory site (eg www.bizdirectory.com.au/businessname), is it possible to have the URL www.businessname.com.au displayed in the Google search results rather than the destination page of www.bizdirectory.com.au/businessname? Thanks in advance,
Web Design | | blackrails
Adam0 -
Website using javascript to serve up content - SEO Friendly?
I'm checking out a dentist website http://www.sagedentalnj.com/ I was referred by a friend so just taking a little peek at it. When you click on the menu items, the url at the top doesn't change. When you view source, the page titles are all the same. when I do site:http://www.sagedentalnj.com/ none of his pages are indexed by google. What can be done with his site so that google sees his pages? Maybe submit sitemap?
Web Design | | Czubmeister0 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0 -
How is an SEO's time best used?
We have over 50 highly varied and niche sites in our company. Each website is for an annual event spread across the calendar. I am the solo SEO person here and was wondering what your opinions are about what would bring in the greatest SEO power in my limited daily allotment; link building? Keywords? Content? Oh, and to make my life even easier - its all based on SharePoint 2007!
Web Design | | DaveGerecht0 -
Crawl Budget vs Canonical
Got a debate raging here and I figured I'd ask for opinions. We have our websites structured as site/category/product This is fine for URL keywords, etc. We also use this for breadcrumbs. The problem is that we have multiple categories into which a category fits. So "product" could also be at site/cat1/product
Web Design | | Highland
site/cat2/product
site/cat3/product Obviously this produces duplicate content. There's no reason why it couldn't live under 1 URL but it would take some time and effort to do so (time we don't necessarily have). As such, we're applying the canonical band-aid and calling it good. My problem is that I think this will still kill our crawl budget (this is not an insignificant number of pages we're talking about). In some cases the duplicate pages are bloating a site by 500%. So what say you all? Do we just simply do canonical and call it good or do we need to take into account the crawl budget and actually remove the duplicate pages. Or am I totally off base and canonical solves the crawl budget issue as well?0