Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
303 redirect
-
Hi,
303 redirect is a good thing or not ?
I have a homepage in 2 languages FR and EN > mywebsite.com/fr/ and mywebsite.com/en/.
A 303 redirect is on mywebsite.com to mywebsite.com/fr/.
Thanks
D.
-
Hi Wesley & D.,
I really appreciate the what you said & did however I did not administer the experiment or create content.
Thank you for the kind words however I did not do the work for this I only for the used it as a reference to describe the situation.
I am glad it helped,
All the best,
Thomas
-
Very descriptive answer. Love that you describe your entire experiment.
Thank you for this extra bit of information.
-
affect SERPs the 303 redirect remains fairly unknown because it is rarely used.
I came across a website linking to one of my sites with a 303 but I could not find a definitive answer of whether or not this link passed any PageRank. Information online about this was scarce and the only information I found was from people saying that only 301 redirects pass PageRank.
When I checked the status code for 303 redirect at w3.org it was “See other” . The description reads as follows:
“The new URI is not a substitute reference for the originally requested resource. The 303 response MUST NOT be cached, but the response to the second (redirected) request might be cacheable.”
This sounds very black and white and I my initial guess was that Google does not flow PR for 303 redirects. But I was curious, how was Google treating 303 redirects?
I set up an experiment to check how Google was handling the 303. Results below:
*Note: The translation for this keyword is NSFW
Google will show the search result with the URI that is initially requested. It will then show the Page Title and Meta Description (or other descriptive snippet) for the redirected page but it will show the URI from the redirecting page. It is caching the text from the final page but assigning it to the requested page.
How Google caches 303 redirects
Page A 303 redirects to Page B
Title: Page B
URI: Page A
Meta Description: Page B
Since page B does not rank for this keyword it is confirmed that the 303 redirect does not flow PR.
How did I set this test up?
- I chose a rare keyword that had very few pages ranking for it.
- On www.a.com I created two pages containing the keyword with the same exact content (www.a.com/a.htm .com/b.htm)
- One page (www.a.com/a.htm) was linked to internally multiple times
- One page (www.a.com/b.htm) was linked to externally with 303 redirects only from two domains (including www.marketingchip.com)
- The 303 redirects were created on the external pages (www.marketingchip.com/special-doors.html -> 303 -> www.a.com/b.htm)
After a few days neither www.a.com/a.htm nor www.a.com/b.htm appear in the results. However the number one listing for this keyword was forwww.marketingchip.com/special-doors.html but the meta title and the meta description are taken from www.a.com/b.htm. I acquired the information from this URL and would agree with Wesley definitely 301 redirect the link to not use a 303 and less you are trying to accomplish something similar to what it's shown above or in Wesley's comment. http://www.marketingchip.com/seo-experiments/how-does-a-303-redirect-affect-seo/ Sincerely, Thomas
-
A 303 won't send 'link juice' that means that all the value you website gets on mywebsite.com won't be send to mywebsite.com/fr/. You should use a 301 instead.
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
-
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Should I redirect images when I migrate my site
We are about to migrate a large website with a fair few images (20,000). At the moment we include images in the sitemap.xml so they are indexed by Google and drive traffic (not sure how I can find out how much though). Current image slugs are like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia
http://website.com/assets/images/a2/65680/thumbnails/638x425-crop.jpg?1402460458 Like on the old site, images on the new website will also have unreadable cache slugs, like:
http://website.com/site_media/media/cache/ce/7a/ce7aeffb1e5bdfc8d4288885c52de8e3.jpg All content pages on the new site will have the same slugs as on the old site. Should I go through the trouble of redirecting all these images?0 -
Redirect at Registrar or Server
Hi folks, I have run into a situation were a new client has 3 TLDs (e.g. mycompany.com, mycompany.org and mycompany.biz), all with the same content. They are on a Windows IIS environment, which I am not familiar with. Until now, all of my clients have been Linux/Apache environment, so I always dealt with these issues utilizing htaccess. Currently all resolve to the same IP, but the URL remains the same in the browser address field (e.g. if you type-in mycompany.org - it remains as such). We want the .org and .biz version to 301 Redirect to the .com TLD. I am wondering what the best practice might be in this situation? Could we simply redirect at the registrar level or would implementation at the server level be best? If so, I would really appreciate an example from someone with experience implementing redirects on IIS. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Is 301 redirect suggested on pagination pages
Hi - Due to pagination the default page of site is coming in 2 url with - ?page=1/ sub-url and /sub-url is 301 a recommended solution due to this pagination urls Also - is it required to create separate title and meta description of every pagination page We are taking specifically in context of our discounts and offer section http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_offers&view=list&Itemid=9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Login redirect 302
Ok - anyone knows what to do with the temporary redirect to the login page? In our e-commerce system we have a checkout page, which requires user to be logged in - if they are not, we redirect them to the login page using simple php header("Locaiton: url"). This however has been found as a Warning as it's a temporary redirect. I can't really put there permanent redirect for obvious reasons so if someone could give me some clue on this situation that would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coremediadesign0 -
GeoIP - Redirect all but target country
My client would like to redirect all non UK traffic from their UK site to their main group site. I am intending to use a .htaccess redirect, like this: RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} !^GB$
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.group.com$1 [R,L] I have tested the redirect at it works fine. My question is if I put this in place would it have any negative SEO impact on the UK site?0 -
Old Redirecting Website Still Showing In SERPs
I have a client, a plumber, who bought another plumbing company (and that company's domain) at one point. This other company was very old and has a lot of name recognition so they created a dedicated page to this other company within their main website, and redirected the other company's old domain to that page. This has worked fine, in that this page on the main site is now #1 when you search for the other old company's name. But for some reason the old domain comes up #2 (despite the fact that it's redirecting). Now, I could understand if the redirect had only been set up recently, but I'm reasonably sure this happened about a year ago. Could it be due to the fact that there are many sites out there still linking to that old domain? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VTDesignWorks1 -
Redirecting Canonical 301s and Magento Website
I have an issue with a client's website where it has 3700+ pages, but roughly half of them are duplicates. Thankfully, the only difference between the original and the duplictes is the "?print" at the end of each URL (I suppose this is Magento's way of making a printable page version of the same page. I don't know, I didn't build it.) My questions is, how can I get all the pages like this http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html?print to redirect to pages like this... http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html Also, do they NEED to be Canonical, or will a 301 redirect be sufficient. Also, after having done this, if anybody knows, is there a way I can turn that feature off in Magento, because we're expanding our product line, and I don't want to have to keep chasing after these "?print" pages after the fact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClifThompson0