undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • MozCon
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    Let your business shine with Listings AI
    Moz Local

    Let your business shine with Listings AI

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Digital Marketing
  3. Web Design
  4. 302 redirects, canonicalise or redirect (301)?

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.

302 redirects, canonicalise or redirect (301)?

Web Design
3
5
1.4k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • eLab_London
    eLab_London last edited by Jun 16, 2015, 1:53 PM

    Hey Guys,

    I am fairly new to 'technical' SEO as I was lucky enough in my old role to have technical expertise in the team for things like this, now I am learning myself and it is a slow and painful process, so your expertise is soooo much appreciated! My I.T. dept say that I have 3 instances on my website where the Hybris platform is creating a 302 redirect automatically - the first:

    1. URL doesn't exist - Hybris creates a temp 302 - the system does not create case sensitive url's

    | http://www.example.fr/Example/Marques/0180/brand/CHANEL | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 |

    | http://www.example.fr/Example/Marques/0015/brand/Giorgio-Armani | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 |
    | http://www.example.fr/fr/Example/marken/0507/brand/lancome | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 |

    I believe these are being redirected due to the fact that capital letters are being created in the url.

    1. Multi-lingual redirects

    I have a German and French version of my site and whenever any switches from one URL to the other using our language selector a 302 is created.

    1. Dynamic URL elements

    Dynamic url elements and special characters are being created in the URL, I am not sure where this is happening, but my I.T. department would like me to go and see whether this is something that can be created by a browser.

    If anyone has any similar problems or have any advice or insights even, I would love to hear from you! Thanks

    🙂

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • eLab_London
      eLab_London @eglove last edited by Jun 17, 2015, 5:20 AM Jun 17, 2015, 5:20 AM

      Thank you Ethan, Yes I will recommend a 301 redirect to the I.T. guys, but I do think that my I.T. guys wont like me much 😕

      Please can I ask - why would I need to create more content to canonicalise it if I already have two url's? Would I not just add code to both pages?

      If the page 1 url exists and temp redirects it to the page 2 url, would I not just add code to both pages? Or if I add code to the page 1 url, would it be exactly the same to the other variations?

      Please teach me this as I will need to explain it to the I.T. dept as this was there recommendations. I think I will most definitely need tech help moving forward!

      Thanks a lot for your time!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • eLab_London
        eLab_London @PatrickDelehanty last edited by Jun 17, 2015, 5:15 AM Jun 17, 2015, 5:15 AM

        Thanks Patrick,

        This is indeed helpful. I have read these links; SO:

        • Redirects should be 301.

        • I need to add href lang tags (for google and bing) on my website and I need to look more into geo targeting in more detail.

        - Do you recommend I need to find out why these urls are being created? and yes this has also crossed over with the duplicate content project we are running too. But 301's are a solution until I figure out why these url's are being created so we can get it fixed.

        I will check the sitemap today.

        Thanks for your advice 🙂

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • PatrickDelehanty
          PatrickDelehanty last edited by Jun 16, 2015, 5:47 PM Jun 16, 2015, 2:10 PM

          Hi there

          I recommend learning the best practices for redirects, as well as hreflang attributes and language tags - you should also read into country targeting your sites in Google and Bing - this is a big deal for international SEO and targeting.

          I would also look into your dynamic URLs by reading through this resource from Google on potential duplicate content - this will help you categorize and manage your URLs, helping Google understand their purpose. You should also check your internal links and sitemap to make sure that there are not dynamic URLs listed there.

          This will require your web development team as well, so make sure they read and understand these resources, both for current and future situations. Some of this has the tendency to get pretty technical and indepth so if you need help, know that Moz has a fantastic Recommended Companies page to help.

          That being said, 301 redirects are preferred by search engines, 302s passes 0% link juice and most cases should not be used, and all URLs (and their dynamic variations) should have a canonical tag to the preferred URL.

          Hope this helps! Good luck!

          eLab_London 1 Reply Last reply Jun 17, 2015, 5:15 AM Reply Quote 2
          • eglove
            eglove last edited by Jun 16, 2015, 1:56 PM Jun 16, 2015, 1:56 PM

            Do a 301, there's no need to create more content just to canonicalize it. 302's aren't too bad, but the permanent redirect is best practice.

            eLab_London 1 Reply Last reply Jun 17, 2015, 5:20 AM Reply Quote 0
            • 1 / 1
            1 out of 5
            • First post
              1/5
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • Small_Business_SEO

              Do I need to 301 redirect www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com/ ?

              So, interestingly enough, the Moz crawler picked up my index.html file (homepage) and reported duplicate content, of course. But, Google hasn't seemed to index the www.domain.com/index.html version of my homepage, just the www.domain.com version. However, it looks like I do have links going specifically to www.domain.com/index.html and I want to make sure those are getting counted towards my overall domain strength. Is it necessary to 301 redirect in the scenario described above?

              Web Design | Jun 16, 2015, 7:36 AM | Small_Business_SEO
              0
            • soobumim

              Wordpress - redirecting tags

              I just ran a webmaster tool from Yoast SEO premium and notice I have a lot of problems with tags (restricted-robots-txt) For example : http://www.soobumimphotography.com/tag/wedding-group-photo/ Do I have to redirect to http://www.soobumimphotography.com/wedding-group-photo/ Should I do this to each and every posts Thank you

              Web Design | Mar 28, 2014, 8:42 AM | soobumim
              0
            • SheffieldMarketing

              How to rewrite/redirect a folder name with .htaccess

              I have a folder in my site that I want to rename. I don’t want to just rewrite the URL and keep my old folder name, I want to change the folder name and then do whatever is necessary with .hataccess to not lose search engine rankings. The folder name I want to change has a space in it and also is misspelled (whoops x2) Example. Mysite.com/old foldr/page.html Mysite.com/newfolder/page.html How would I go about doing this with .htaccess?  Do I just switch the folder name on my server and then set up a redirect, or do I do a rewrite?  Sorry now familiar with the terms or .htacces. Thanks all

              Web Design | Dec 14, 2013, 9:34 AM | SheffieldMarketing
              0
            • Will_Craig

              Is it better to redirect a url or set up a landing page for a new site?

              Hi, One of our clients has got a new website but is still getting quite a lot of traffic to her old site which has a page authority of 30 on the home page and has about 20 external backlinks. It's on a different hosting package so a different C block but I was wondering if anyone could advise if it would be better to simply redirect this page to the new site or set up a landing page on this domain simply saying "Site has moved, you can now find us here..." sort of idea. Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks

              Web Design | Mar 7, 2013, 1:45 PM | Will_Craig
              0
            • proptiger

              Redirects (301/302) versus errors (404)

              I am not able to convincingly decide between using redirects versus using 404 errors. People are giving varied opinions. Here are my cases 1. Coding errors - we put out a bad link a. Some people are saying redirect to home page; the user at least has something to do PLUS more importantly it does NOT hurt your SEO ranking. b. Counter - the page ain't there. Return 404 2. Product removed - link1 to product 1 was out there. We removed product1; so link1 is also gone. It is either lying in people's bookmarks, OR because of coding errors we left it hanging out at some places on our site.

              Web Design | Jan 24, 2013, 4:26 AM | proptiger
              0
            • Naghirniac

              Is there a limit for 301 redirection in htaccess file?

              For the SEO perspective, there is a limit for the number of 301 redirection inside the htaccess file?

              Web Design | Mar 1, 2012, 12:26 PM | Naghirniac
              0
            • WilliamBay

              Display a message after 301 redirect.

              I know this one is a little more technical than pure SEO, but it somewhat ties in. I'm redirecting 2 sites to one. The companies have combined, and I've imported all their content that has been created, and the url mapping is set up correctly. So it currently is set up like this: A.com --> C.com
              A.com/blogpost-1 --> C.com/blogpost-1 B.com --> C.com B.com/blogpost-20 --> C.com/blogpost-20 What i would like is some method a redirect when landing at C.com or C.com/blogpost-XX. And in turn display a message in a DIV so I can style it. And yes, I have nothing better to do on a Friday night 🙂

              Web Design | Feb 11, 2012, 8:42 PM | WilliamBay
              0
            • hfranz

              Parked Domain or Redirect

              Should I park a domain or Redirect? And what is the best way? I need to switch our domain name. I currently have all of our domains redirecting to our main website. I have set up there own hosting in our cpanel account so I could redirect them to our main domain. Was this too many steps? I tried putting all of our domains in our main domains, .htaccess file, and redirected them to our main website, but they did not work. So that is why I set up there own cpanel accounts. Now they work fine. However, my hosting company told me that I could just park the domain on our current domains account.  If I can redirect all of these domain in one place, that would be great. I thought that a parked domain is considered duplicate websites, as both urls work, displaying the entire website with both urls. So Would I have to re upload our entire website to the account that I want as our main domain? Or is there another way of going about doing this?

              Web Design | Jun 16, 2011, 4:13 PM | hfranz
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.