302 Redirect of www. version of a site - Pros/Cons

[howardd]

Hi,

I am considering making the 301 redirect from the domain to a 302 temporary redirect.

Currently if a user lands on "www" version of the site, they are redirected to the non "www" version. But after the redirect, they will land on an external webpage (so if a user lands on the "www" version, they are redirected to a different website, not related to my domain).

Reason I'm considering this is because I have received a large number of spammy backlinks on the "www" version of the site (negative seo). So I'm hoping that the temporary redirect will help me recover.

Your thoughts on this:

1. Is this the best way to do a 302 redirect (redirecting the www version to an external domain)?

2. Will the redirect help the main domain recover, considering all spammy backlinks are pointing to the www version?

3. What are the pros/cons, if any?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Howard

[Chris.Menke]

Sounds like that will likely get what traffic you have currently going to www over to the new domain but I don't think it's going to help you recover in any way.  You're either going to have to work hard at eliminating the links to the www site and/or work hard to build up authority for the new domain.  If you feel reviving the www site is out of the question, this could be the way to go as I haven't heard of anyone speaking of repercussions from 302ing visitors from one domain to another due to Penguin.

[howardd]

Thanks Chris. Thankfully I wouldn't lose all the traffic since most links are pointing to the non www url. This would only be a temporary redirect until I clean up the bad links but I thought doing the 302 redirect before the penguin may give me a chance to clean up those links while not being completely affected by them.

[Chris.Menke]

Basically, though, I wouldn't count on using any redirects to get you around a penguin penalty or shorten its duration.  Typically, for those who get out of penguin, it takes a lot of work on dealing with the links combined with a lot of work on content--so much so, that it  seems to take a total commitment to the domain to make it happen.

It sounds like you may be preparing for the worst but that you haven't been impacted yet.  If that's the case, I'd just wait it out, at this point, and if you get hit, make a commitment to a domain and stick with it.

[Carson-Ward]

I agree with Chris that changing the redirect to a 302 redirect is unlikely to have the desired impact. These days Google is pretty good about awarding credit for homepage links, even if the configuration isn't ideal (i.e. there is both a non-www and a www that resolves.) If they award credit for such non-ideal configurations, they probably also transfer the negative stuff.

Let me ask, though: are you sure that you're suffering from a link-based penalty caused by negative SEO? Did you receive a warning in Webmaster Tools, or did you see traffic drop on the date of a Penguin refresh?

I'm also a little confused about your configuration. You said, "after the redirect, they will land on an external webpage". If I understand you, you're saying your homepage redirects people to a different domain? If so, that really sounds like a sneaky redirect at worst, or a doorway page at best. Google doesn't want to send people to your domain if you suddenly redirect users to a new domain with something "not related to your domain."

[howardd]

Just to clarify, let me be more specific about what I initially planned to do:

Let's say my current website is at: example.com. Rel canonical is set so that if a user lands on www.example.com, they're redirect to the non www version.

For some reason, the negative seo targeted the www.example.com instead of the main url. So I'm thinking since all the bad links are pointing to the www version, redirecting that to somewhere else may help.

What you say makes sense, that google can detect that both versions are from the same domain.

I didn't see any major drops from the penguin last night. The main drop started middle of March and continued through April. This seems to have been an algo penalty vs. manual penalty as I didn't receive a warning.

The entire homepage wouldn't redirect, just the www domain. I doubt anyone would be affected by this since the rel canonical is set to the non www.

I think I agree with Chris on this and just wait it out and see if the disavow request goes anywhere.