View Full Version : Can 302 redirect help being indexed
Hi everyone.
I work for a medium size travel web site in the uk and we are having problem being indexed in google.co.uk on the uk pages only. The reason seems to be because our uk domain name redirect to our .com domain name using a 301 and our servers are located outside the uk. We have been advised by an SEO agencies to Set-up www.oursite.co.uk to 302 redirect to www.oursite.com or directly to the UK version of the site - by reconfiguring the .htaccess.txt file and this should sort out our problem.
Can anyone tell me if this solution would work before I start nagging our IT department.
JohnW
07-19-2006, 07:52 AM
>We have been advised by an SEO agencies to Set-up www.oursite.co.uk to 302 redirect to www.oursite.com or directly to the UK version of the site
I'm not sure about that. I really can't think of any good reason to use a 302 for this. In fact 302s usually don't do what you want might expect them to do anyway. I would be interested in the reasoning behind this, can you get them to explain?
g1smd
07-19-2006, 03:16 PM
A 302 redirect from .co.uk to .com will cause the content on the .com pages to be indexed with .co.uk URLs - which would instantly pick up a Duplicate Content Penalty for being, umm, Duplicate Content.
mcanerin
07-19-2006, 07:35 PM
Actually the 302 would work in that case and do what you want.
But there is a catch. There is always a catch, and this one is a big one - it's why normally an SEO would never tell you to use a 302 for anything.
You can ONLY have one 302 pointing to any given page.*
If you 302 the www.co.uk to www.com, but then also have a 302 from the non-www version in place, bad things will happen.
Bad things will also happen if someone links to your site using a tracking page with a 302 on it (aka 302 Hijack).
It's very easy to tell a search engine that more than one page is the "proper" (canonical) page - which can't logically happen. How they handle this logical impossibility varies from engine to engine, but the result is almost never in your favor, rankings-wise.
Although what the firm told you is technically true, the number of things that could go wrong with it are so numerous that I strongly recommend not doing it.
In your case, I would recommend a 301 from the .com to the .co.uk.
Ian
* To the highly anal and technical among you, you could have more than one 302 if you managed to plan it really, really carefully, knew every possible issue and permutation, daisy-chained it, and could guarantee that no one would ever link to that page but you.
But if you want to get technical, you probably could do it, if you were a serious DNS hobbyist with no life. Like me. :o
brilliant! Thank you very much for all the advice. It is very helpful indeed. It's always good to ask people who know.