302 redirects in SEO

302 redirects are a temporary redirects which inform the search engines that your page has moved to a new location temporarily. Many CMS systems use 302 redirects so that the URLs the search engines read are friendly, whilst pointing the user to the unfriendly page.

For example their may be a link on the site to a product page that has the following friendly URL www.website.com/products.html. The CMS system might very well 302 redirect the user to the following page www.website.com/user/state=0?&section=home. This was probably implemented by the CMS system so that the page works.

The issue the search engines have is whether to keep the old page in the index, or replace the page in their index with its new location. This is where issues can occur

Search engines realise that there isn’t many situations where users would use a 302 redirect, it is more common to move pages permanently using a 301 redirect than to use a 302.
302’s are often implemented by webmasters accidently as they can be created in JavaScript or with a meta redirect quite easily.

Google has had issues handling 302 ’s properly throughout its history, we do now know however that Google does not pass link juice onto the redirecting page.

In Conclusion I would advise not to use 302 redirects if you can help it. If you are moving a page always use a 301 redirect as it is more search engine friendly and will stop any issues. Avoid confusing the search engines with 302 redirects as you could end up with duplicate pages in the index.

Try to avoid changing names where possible as Google places power on page names in their index, its important to remember that even when implementing a 301 it can take a while for the power to transfer over.

Paul
SEO Project Manager

Listen to this podcast

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post
TrackBack URI

Leave a comment