Redirect Without Passing Old Page Properties

[NTGproducts]

Is there a way to redirect one page to another, e.g. test.com/ to test.com/home, without passing link juice or any other associated properties of the latter to the former?

[jesse-landry]

302 passes no link juice

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

Jesse is right, a 302 doesn't pass PageRank, but it make pass other signals (such as understanding of content, associated penalties - these are just my guesses by the way). Is this something where you are concerned of passing bad link signals? Or other undesired signals?

Also, technically a 302 is for "temporary" redirects, but people do misuse this temporary bit all the time and leave them more or less permanently

-Dan

[jesse-landry]

Hey Dan can we talk about that whole concept of "temporary" redirecting signals for a moment?

My company has a site that was hit hard by Penguin and luckily the site was unnecessary to begin with as this company had 2 brands targeting the same business (don't get me started!). Anyway, the domain had to redirect for the sake of existing clients, so I recommended a 302. Now it's been sitting as a 302 for quite some time and everything has worked out fine thus far but I wonder what the ramifications are.

I know it's supposed to be temporary, but who's to stop us from leaving them permanently? Do you know of any sort of indexing issues this can lead to? Sounds like from what you're saying it doesn't really make a ton of difference but I've been wondering about this.

Could all just be semantics I guess.. Makes me wonder what the point of a 302 was when it was conceived by the web-gods.

Thoughts?

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Jesse

It gets tricky to say the least. First there's the protocols which are best practice "rules" for any web development - http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

But then there's Google's sort of own interpretations and treatment of those redirects on top of that. And there's always what Google says vs what they actually might be doing.

Technically a 302 is "found" although everyone uses it for "temporary" and yet a 307 is a temporary. I recall Google saying in their eyes there is no difference.

Yeah I guess you could leave 302s or 307s in forever, and how long is acceptable? I could leave a 302 redirect in place for 20 years and then decide to move it back? Is that what they mean?

As far as what Google does with them there's lots of Google and 3rd party resources about them and like I said we can probably find a few Matt Cutts videos talking about how they treat them - but then there's reality - which brings a lot of variables and moving parts.

So I think the main idea is as cliche as it sounds, all real situations are different. I follow this train of thought;

1. If possible, FIRST choose what to do based upon best web standards and in most cases this should hopefully satisfy SEO.
2. But if you have to do something purely for SEO - basically manipulate a known hole in how these things work vs. how Google supposedly treats them, because that's the only thing that will fix something - then do that. This might be why for example you'd choose a 302 redirect despite knowing it's not really temporary

[jesse-landry]

Well put, thanks Dan. I'm going to stick with the 302 "temporarily." Wink, wink.

After all, everything is temporary right?!