301 redirect file question
-
Hi Everyone,
I am creating a list of 301 redirects to give to a developer to put into Magento. I used Screaming Frog to crawl the site, but I have noticed that all of their urls 302 to another page. I am wondering if I should 301 the first URL to the url on the new site, or the second. I am thinking the first, but would love some confirmation.
Thank you!
-
Google will index the second URL but will not pass any SEO weight to it since, as a temporary redirection, the first URL is expected to be restored shortly.
You can find a very helpful explanation about redirections here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
-
HI Alyssa, Dave here.
I know you may not want to give out your URL publically but if you can send me your URL as a private message I'm happy to look into it specifically as I'd hate to give the wrong answer. I'll answer it here in this thread so it can serve as useful to others but I'll keep the URL to myself.
Dave
-
Thanks Daniel. There isn't a good reason anymore, we are moving the site and have a new design. I am thinking that Google is indexing the original URL though since they see the second URL as temporary. Is this incorrect?
Alyssa
-
Hi Dave,
The current site is .net I believe. We are moving to a Magento site. It's an old site so we're not sure why they have all these 302's, but I am planning on making them all 301's so we can move whatever rank there is.
Wouldn't Google actually be indexing the original URL since these are 302 redirects and they see them as temporary?
Thanks for your help!
Alyssa -
I don't know the specific scenario you're talking about obviously but I'd recommend first checking under:
system > configuration > web > url options
Majento shouldn't be generating a 302 on every page but I'll be the first to say that Majento also isn't my strong suit. I don't like the sounds of it however as a 302 can bleed out your PageRank.
At what I'm hearing I'd recommend for the 301s you're setting up now - point them to the final target. Even if Majento was doing a 301 I'd still recommend this. Think of it like you're asking me for directions and I know both the final destination and another guy who does too. Would you rather I just told you where to go or pointed at the other guy?
That said, hopefully someone can come up with a more specific Majento answer for you.
-
If there is a good reason for those redirects to be temporary, use the first URL. If not use the second.
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
-
Forced Redirects/HTTP<>HTTPS 301 Question
Hi All, Sorry for what's about to be a long-ish question, but tl;dr: Has anyone else had experience with a 301 redirect at the server level between HTTP and HTTPS versions of a site in order to maintain accurate social media share counts? This is new to me and I'm wondering how common it is. I'm having issues with this forced redirect between HTTP/HTTPS as outlined below and am struggling to find any information that will help me to troubleshoot this or better understand the situation. If anyone has any recommendations for things to try or sources to read up on, I'd appreciate it. I'm especially concerned about any issues that this may be causing at the SEO level and the known-unknowns. A magazine I work for recently relaunched after switching platforms from Atavist to Newspack (which is run via WordPress). Since then, we've been having some issues with 301s, but they relate to new stories that are native to our new platform/CMS and have had zero URL changes. We've always used HTTPS. Basically, the preview for any post we make linking to the new site, including these new (non-migrated pages) on Facebook previews as a 301 in the title and with no image. This also overrides the social media metadata we set through Yoast Premium. I ran some of the links through the Facebook debugger and it appears that Facebook is reading these links to our site (using https) as redirects to http that then redirect to https. I was told by our tech support person on Newspack's team that this is intentional, so that Facebook will maintain accurate share counts versus separate share counts for http/https, however this forced redirect seems to be failing if we can't post our links with any metadata. (The only way to reliably fix is by adding a query parameter to each URL which, obviously, still gives us inaccurate share counts.) This is the first time I've encountered this intentional redirect thing and I've asked a few times for more information about how it's set up just for my own edification, but all I can get is that it’s something managed at the server level and is designed to prevent separate share counts for HTTP and HTTPS. Has anyone encountered this method before, and can anyone either explain it to me or point me in the direction of a resource where I can learn more about how it's configured as well as the pros and cons? I'm especially concerned about our SEO with this and how this may impact the way search engines read our site. So far, nothing's come up on scans, but I'd like to stay one step ahead of this. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | ogiovetti0 -
Is 301 redirect the only way when using Vanity URLs?
We have been using vanity urls for some of our pages. Mostly the pages that have a vanity URL have a long URL length. But now the problem is, the vanity URL is getting displayed on the search engine when the particular keyword related to the page is entered. I checked the google search console, the vanity URL is indexed and the original URL remains unindexed. What should I do? Is adding 301 redirect to the vanity URLs are solution? Since some of vanity URLs are not redirecting to the original. Some of the original pages are not getting traffic. Also, can using canonical tag help?
Technical SEO | | tejasbansode0 -
Resolving 301 Redirect Chains from Different URL Versions (http, https, www, non-www)
Hi all, Our website has undergone both a redesign (with new URLs) and a migration to HTTPS in recent years. I'm having difficulties ensuring all URLs redirect to the correct version all the while preventing redirect chains. Right now everything is redirecting to the correct version but it usually takes up to two redirects to make this happen. See below for an example. How do I go about addressing this, or is this not even something I should concern myself with? Redirects (2) <colgroup><col width="123"><col width="302"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | theyoungfirm
| Redirect Type | URL |
| | http://www.theyoungfirm.com/blog/2009/index.html 301 | https://theyoungfirm.com/blog/2009/index.html 301 | https://theyoungfirm.com/blog/ | This code below was what we added to our htaccess file. Prior to adding this, the various subdomain versions (www, non-www, http, etc.) were not redirecting properly. But ever since we added it, it's now created these additional URLs (see bolded URL above) as a middle step before resolving to the correct URL. RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Your feedback is much appreciated. Thanks in advance for your help. Sincerely, Bethany0 -
Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | TaraLP1 -
Changing title tags, do we need 301 redirects
I found many duplicate title tags and I'm in the process of changing it Do I need 301 redirects in place when I switch it? I am only changing the title tag. Also, we are switching over to a new site very soon, I am worried that we might be using too many 301 redirect "hops" because we are doing a lot of optimization as well. (video from matt cutts describing 301 redirects and hops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA. Does anyone have any experience in doing too many redirect hops that it affected your rankings? Any good ideas to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
301 redirects and old domain names
Thanks to the great advice i've received on this forum, I'm combining 50 different truck sites into a single, ultimate truck website. So my question is how long should I make a website 301 redirect to the appropriate page on my new website? My thought is that if it works well to have a single website, it might be nice to eventually sell off some of the old domain names that I won't be using anymore. Thanks! Andy
Technical SEO | | daenterpri0