I really like Matt's response...

SEO advice: discussing 302 redirects

by Matt Cutts on <abbr class="published" title="2006-01-04">January 4, 2006</abbr>

in Google/SEO

In a previous post I talked a little bit about 302s. Let’s cover them in more detail. A 302 redirect can be on-domain or off-domain. On-domain is simple and not prone to hijacking, so let’s talk about that first. Suppose you go to www.xbox.com and the site does a 302 redirect to some really long url, or a url with a session ID (this used to be what xbox.com did a couple years ago. Now you end up at e.g. www.xbox.com/en-US/, but play along with me). Would you rather see www.xbox.com or www.xbox.com/home/redir/sess?session=23412341234124124231455423633 ? Yeah, I’d rather see just www.xbox.com too. That’s why for on-domain 302 redirects (that is, a redirect in which both the source page and the destination page are both on the same domain), search engines will usually pick the shorter url. Hopefully that makes sense. I’d rather see www.example.com than www.example.com/deep/home/page?last=root&sessid=909345AF2343 , and I think most people would too.

Q: Time out. I’ve got a question. What’s the deal with 302 vs. 301? What does that mean? What’s the difference?
A: The “302″ refers to the HTTP status codes that are returned to your browser when you request a page. For example, a 404 page is called a “404″ because web servers return a status code of 404 to indicate that a requested page wasn’t found. The difference between a 301 and a 302 is that a 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location, while a 302 status code means that a page has temporarily moved to a new location. For example, if you try to fetch a page http://example.com/ and the web server says “That’s a 301. The new location is http://www.example.com/” then the web server is saying “That url you requested? It’s moved permanently to the new location I’m giving you.”

Okay, back to our regular discussion. Now let’s talk about off-domain 302 redirects. By definition, those are redirects from one domain A.com to another domain B.com that are claimed to be temporary; that is, the web server on A.com could always change its mind and start showing content on A.com again. The vast majority of the time that a search engine receives an off-domain 302 redirect, the right thing to do is to crawl/index/return the destination page (in the example we mentioned, it would be B.com). In fact, if you did that 100% of the time, you would never have to worry about “hijacking”; that is, content from B.com returned with an A.com url. Google is moving to a set of heuristics that return the destination page more than 99% of the time. Why not 100% of the time? Most search engine reserve the right to make exceptions when we think the source page will be better for users, even though we’ll only do that rarely.

Let’s take an example from the tiny fraction of the time that we may reserve the right to show the source page for a 302 off-domain redirect. If you run wget on www.sfgiants.com, you’ll get a 302 redirect to a different domain, and the url that you’ll get is pretty ugly: http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf . Please set aside that you are probably a site owner or webmaster for a second, and try to step into the shoes of a regular user on the street. If we had a taste test, how many users would prefer to click on “sfgiants.com” and how many would prefer to click on “sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf” ? Normal users usually like short, clean urls. They are less likely to say “mlb.com? I wonder what that stands for? Hmm. Maybe major league baseball? Is that the officially licensed name, I wonder? It probably is. Yes, it looks like sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf is the correct url from my query.”

Now you see the trade-offs. Go with the destination 100% of the time and you’ll get some ugly urls (but never any hijacking). On the other hand, if you sometimes return the source url you can show nicer urls (but with the possibility of source pages showing up when they shouldn’t). Different search engines have different policies that have evolved over time. Over the last year, Google has moved much more toward going with the destination url, for example, and the infrastructure in Bigdaddy continues in this direction.

Let’s take a look at how different engines handle the [sf giants] query. Remember that sfgiants.com does a 302 redirect to a url on a different domain (sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf). And remember that reasonable people can disagree on which url should show up at #1. I’m not trying to criticize any search engine here, but rather trying to point out that this is a weird corner case.

Current Google behavior: we return sfgiants.com at #1. But we also return http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sf/homepage/sf_homepage.jsp at #3, as an uncrawled url, which is definitely poor/suboptimal.

Current Ask behavior: Ask returns giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sf/homepage/sf_homepage.jsp at #1, sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf at #2, and sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sf/homepage/sf_homepage.jsp at #3.

Current MSN behavior: MSN returns giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sf/homepage/sf_homepage.jsp at #1 and sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf at #2.

Current Yahoo! behavior: Yahoo! returns www.sfgiants.com at #1, but also returns sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/index.jsp?c_id=sf at #6. You might think that returning sfgiants.com at #1 isn’t what Yahoo! said that they would do with 302 off-domain redirects (i.e. always go with the destination), but if you read carefully, Yahoo! also reserves the right to make exceptions in handling redirects. That allows them to show a nice url at #1.

Current Google Bigdaddy behavior (data center at 64.233.179.104): Bigdaddy managed to find a short url on the destination domain of mlb.com, namely giants.mlb.com, and returns that. We return it at #1 with no other duplicate urls on the first page.

Yes, when you change URLs  the word is that some but not all of the link juice passes.  But it's not too bad assuming the redesign corrects mistakes, makes the site easier to navigate and crawl. You'll get the link power back soon enough.

So you found out that too! Just develop other sites using the key word you want to rank for. You will have to rank it well as you do your main site page, and watch for duplicate content. You will also lose the value of the age of your site, but all things considered, the exact keywords as the URL kicks butt. Don't listen to anyone who disagrees!

One of the top guys here is a friend of Matt Cutts and makes sure your links meet quality tests, etc. Also helps you find quality sites to get links from. I'm sure a lot of you manage links for your clients and and your own site.  Any users out there or know of someone who uses it and gives you feed back/ Thanks

Excellent response. I love when my pages show up and dominate the first page. One of my search terms in yahoo grabbed the 6th- 10th, spots of the first page of the 10 results. Some were pages i have on blogger type sites.

BTW if you remember 1-2 months ago for a couple of weekends I was on here day and night learning from you and others. I have now mastered on page optimization. WP has a great plug in that saves tons of time. I've stayed away so from from any automatic link posting, or page generator, etc. I have also targeted terms best suited that buyers will click on, both for pages and for PPC. The best advice I can give, is that I've found pages that meet the tests of DA, PA, content, back links etc. for good search results, and found that now google and others are favoring local searches, favoring still the key words in the url, especially the root url, that once you do the basic stuff of on page SEO and develop the best set of key words to target for your business, the hits go up a lot.

All these extra back links don't mean much. Google gives credit for no follows from sites that they like as authority. Plus each key word has it's own difficulty to rank, so if you can't rank a page, try one on another site to rank it, or pay for an ad. i pay Yahoo $10. a month for an ad that pulls! I'll keep the other tricks to myself, but anyone interested can run reports on www.taxproblem.org and see the changes (assuming you did it before) or at least see that pages are better, plus try searching some key words in my industry. There's a lot you can do off site to get seen.

Appreciate your response. The more i look at seomoz I am seeing that maybe I don't need another link management tool.

"and at the same time, the only thing lacking from SEOmoz tools (it would need to be similar though to the Raven Tools one if they made it though as that was really well put together)."

I don't understand what you are saying about how raven is better than seomoz in this area, please be more clear. Thanks

Does this change your response any. I know my industry very well. I am now writing my own content and have in house people to help with the rest. I now realize that when we set up our new site last year as a WP site I was not conscious of how much we messed up the internal SEO. Fixing that now, but forced to write many new pages optimizing key words that we have a chance to rank on. Now here's the kicker (hope I don't offend anyone). I have had schooling in  engineering and statistics and feel that most young people in SEO go nuts on all the details of spreadsheets and metrics, and have little idea about time management for profit. After being in business for over 30 years i know that many things are involved in attracting clients, converting them, and profiting. I see SEO as a tool to get more people to my site and converting them. So I want the best optimization and the best  SERP. I don't want to waste our time creating graphs and rehashing the same info many times.

In the past, Google trashed our site a couple of times(trashed meaning didn't show our pages but no know major penalty) I was part of a link farm, and had the same link text in many links, beginner type stuff. Now I just want to continue to develop good content under high searched for key words and get good back links.

I know my competition enough and my industry to quickly assess the types of links they have and if i want them. So my issue is, do i really have to be concerned with other tools? I have watched part of the advanced DVD's I bought from SEOMOZ and it seems like all this extra stuff is for show and overkill.

Can you tell me what you think I really need or may need and why, beyond the seomoz tools? Your answers will be greatly appreciated.

It kind of does, but so does linkvana, and that has been met with a lot of success by people who talk about it.

Agreed. I have ideas about approaching large companies and offering free services to their employees, and offering schools etc (who have high DA sites) articles etc. on accounting. And will spend time in that area for quality links.

However, i don't believe people naturally link to  the standard old time professions. Dr., Lawyer, accountant etc. like they do to the latest news on Brittney Spears. The internet is still a young persons game. It evolves more based on what values the younger generation has. When I was young my interest were the rock groups i listened to, T.V. Girls, etc. As we get older and have families our interests include finding the right schools for our kids, the right Dr's, lawyers, and accountants. How many people want to spread the word that I know a technique that can save them penalties on their taxes? I'm not saying it doesn't exist, or is impossible to do. There is actually a large community of like minded professionals out there for me to associate with. What I'm saying is that link building does not spread the same way as it does for more popular interests, and as such, the job is different.

So I am really not ignoring the human element (though it sometimes might appear that way), I am being a bit hard core about the need to manipulate the linking structure so that my pages rank high. Thoughts?

I agree with EGOL. He has taught me to consider the value of my content and helped me realize that producing more valuable content is better than most things we think we can do to manipulate the search engines.