Have a problem with our home page. Is temporary 301 redirect an option?

[matthewbyers]

Hey Mozers,

I discovered this morning that the home page for my website is rendering fine in Chrome and Firefox, but very poorly in IE. My analytics show that over 50% of my visitors are using IE. As a result of the problem, IE has a bounce rate 32% higher than other browsers.

I'm not a web developer and I'm fairly new to SEO, so I'm guessing that it's going to take me at least a couple days to get it fixed. In the meantime, I was considering doing a 301 redirect from the home page to the largest category page in hopes of keeping some of the IE users from bouncing while I get the home page sorted out.

Would there be any long term negative effects from this once I get the page sorted out and take the 301 off it? Are there any other solutions that would be better?

Thanks for the help!

[Sebes]

Short answer: DONT!

Repair the glitch even if it is a little bit longer. Let me phrase it this way: "redirects are serious business" and not for html problems.

More on redirects and statuscodes: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/http-status-codes and http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

[SimonCullum]

That pretty much covers it.

Matt, if you do decide to implement such a redirect as you describe, absolutely make sure that it's a 302 redirect, not a 301 Redirect.  301's are permanent (as in the message a 301 gives to search bots), 302's are temporary.

As Sebes says though, your best bet is to not redirect your homepage.  As you say it will take you a couple of days to fix the browser issue, maybe slightly longer, it won't make much difference from your current situation if you just leave the homepage as it is until it's resolved.  Better to be safe in the medium & long-term rather than the very short term and risk harming your site by redirecting your homepage.

Regards

Simon

[matthewbyers]

Thanks guys! I'm glad I asked. You guys rock!

[SimonCullum]

Thanks Matt.  Glad to have helped  

[firstconversion]

The real questoin is : if you think your category page converts better than your homepage - why do have a homepage at all?