Should you change Temporary redirects 302's to a 301 even if page is not important/intended for ranking ?

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

Whilst i appreciate its best practice to 301 redirect permanently moved pages, what if the page is say a login page or other page you not really interested in ranking or transferring juice to ? is it still important/best practice to do so simply because the page has permanently moved hence should still be a 301 even though you don't really want it to rank ?

cheers

dan

[simon_realbuzz]

Choosing to leave a redirect as a 302 is not a major issue as it's not going to have any major effect other than, as you rightly say, preventing full flow of link juice to the new page. However, it is worth considering that while you may not wish to rank for this page you are unnecessarily wasting link juice, however minimal.

In theory, if you're  not overly concerned about rank for this page you could noindex it. The page, although not indexed, would still accumulate page rank (if you changed to a 301) which you could pass internally to other pages in your site. A noindex page can still accumulate and pass pagerank as this old but still relevant article attests.  Really though leaving the 302 in place is not going to be a problem if you decide the benefit of changing it would be minimal.

[FedeEinhorn]

Hmm... are those 302 because you need to login to view that content? or you just removed the page?

If you completely removed the page, then a 301 would be the best option, even if you don't want the final destination to rank, as Simon said, they still accumulate pagerank and pass it to the other linked pages (which some could be of the ones to WANT to rank).

302 are temporary redirects, meaning that it's temporal, at that specific moment the page isn't available (because you need to login to view it, it is being updates, or whatever is the reason), but with a 302 you are basically telling search engines to index that page, but just come back later as specifically now it isn't available.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks for commenting Federico !

Could well be although i don't know for sure - Many of them are to a login page from an 'account/destination/forum' type of url so i presume thats whats happening, needing to redirect temporarily to login, in most of the instances where 302 re-directing to a login page, and hence 302 is correct usage in these instances ?

[FedeEinhorn]

Exactly. If they are redirects because you need to login then a 302 is the way to go. If you use a 301 for those redirects, some browsers may cache that redirect and then when the user is actually logged in, he will still be redirected to the login page as the browser "thought" that page was no longer available (and that can potentially create an infinite loop)...

Over the years, I found 2 options to go about that:

1. You want the pages indexed (those accessible after login in): Use 302, and give Google a way to crawl those pages.
2. You don't want those pages to be indexed (personal info inside): Then you can (while the user is logged out) point the destination to those pages to the login page with a return path, example: http://www.domain.com/login?return=page-to-return, that way you avoid any 3XX redirect without loosing any pagerank in the process (going over any 3XX redirect looses some pagerank as if it was a regular link).

Hope that helped

[Dan-Lawrence]

good info cheers