Using 302 redirect for SEO

[Syl20]

Hello,

I'm in charge of SEO for an information website on which articles are only accessible if you have a login and password. Most of the natural links we get point to our subscribers' subomain : subscribers.mywebsite.com/article1

If they follow these natural links, visitors who are not logged get redirected (302) to www.mywebsite.com/article1 on which there is an extract of the article and they can request a free test subscription to read the end of the article.

My goal is to optimize SEO for the www.mywebsite.com/article1 page.

Does this page benefit from the links I get to the subscribers.mywebsite.com/article1 page or are theses links lost in terms of SEO?

Thanks for your help,

Sylvain

[SErOb]

SE Crawlers are not logged in and will encounter the '302'.  So no flow of "link juice" will be passed.

[RohitPalit]

Swap the 302s (temporary redirect, no flow of PageRank) with 301s (permanent redirect, normal flow of PageRank). Same functionality. As googlebot won't be logged in, it will get 301 redirected.

[john4math]

I'd recommend not changing these to 301 redirects.  301 redirects are permanent, meaning browsers can (and most will) cache them.  Suppose you switch to 301 redirects.  If one of your users' sessions ends, and visits subscribers.mywebsite.com/article1, and gets 301 redirected to www.mywebsite.com/article1.  They log in, and click the link to subscribers.mywebsite.com/article1.  If the browser has cached the redirect, they'll be taken back to www.mywebsite.com/article1!  You definitely don't want that to happen.

Some recent experiments have suggested that 302s do pass some link juice (here's one).  I'd look up how many links you're actually talking about here linking into subscribers.mywebsite.com.

Rather than doing redirects when users sign in, the best thing from my perspective would be to check to see if the user is signed in, and serve the all the content under the same URL.  So all the content would be under www.mywebsite.com, but if they're not logged in, they get the extract of the article, and if they're signed in, they get the full version.  That way all of your links would point to the correct page, subscriber or not (and then you could 301 all the subscribers.mywebsite.com links to www.mywebsite.com, since those URLs wouldn't be needed anymore).

Not that I'd recommend cloaking, but you could see if it's Googlebots IP address, and do 301 redirects in that case.

[Syl20]

Thanks a lot for your answer

[Syl20]

So, if someone links to this page :

http://abonnes.hospimedia.fr/articles/20131004-plfss-2014-les-federations-de-l-aide-a

The juice will not flow to this page?

http://www.hospimedia.fr/actualite/articles/20131010-gestion-des-risques-un-projet-de-decret-vient

[john4math]

That's the gist of it, unfortunately.  Cyrus posted in this blog entry a Tweet from Duane Forrester of Bing saying over time, they learn that 302 redirects encountered repeatedly are more permanent and begin to treat them like 301 redirects.  I would imagine Google does something similar because it makes sense to do, and would improve search results overall, but I have no evidence to back that up.