301 versus 302 directs
I’ve just been reading an post on Aaron Wall’s blog about 301 redirects and how they can affect your rankings.
I played around with 301 and 302 redirects with a couple of my sites earlier in the year due to a structural reorg on one site and a Google penalty the other.
On the first site I initially used a 302 direct and saw no drop in ranking for the page - it remained at number 1 position for the target keyword with Google still showingthe original page in the SERPS for several weeks. The redirect was:
www.domain.com/dir/page.htm to www.domain.com/topic1/topic2/page.htm
When I changed the redirect to a 301 I saw an immediate drop in the SERPS and although I bounce up to #1 around once a week the page usually ranks in 4th or 5th place. The original page got a load of natural links back in November and my guess is that the 301 isn’t passing all Google’s link love.
With the other site hit by a Google penalty I moved 2 distinct areas of the site to a subdomain. One of those I redirected with a 301, the other with a 302. When neither appeared in the SERPS where they should have been it was clear that they too were penalised, so I moved a third area of the website to a new domain with a 301 rediect.
No penalty, but the domain is too young to rank well for anything as it’s a hugely competitive market. It’s also interesting that the section I moved off the original domain was the area of the site that I thought had caused the penalty. I was wrong it seems because as well as the new domain remaining unpenalized the original domain retains its penalty.
So what conclusions can you draw from all that? Not a lot really as it was never set up to be rigorously scientific, but Aaron’s post draws some conclusions from his own experiences.