Temporary Redirect 302 to subdomain for a couple of weeks?

[TVFreak]

Hi,

To prevent DDOS attack during the Olympic Game the admins will use a service call Site Shield by Akamai (http://www.akamai.com/html/solutions/site_shield.html).

The thing is that they will have to redirect all the trafic to a subdomain instead of the main one (http://www.website.com instead of http://website.com) and this for a couple of week (no negotiation here, it's too late and they have no choice).

Does a 302 will do the job? Will I loose authority? Does adding a canonical URL on every pages of the site removing the www from the URL will help? Should I do something on webmaster tool to help?

Thanks.

[TVFreak]

Anyone?

It's not a classic should I redirect 302 or 301, I need to recommend a solution ASAP to limit the impact of this service.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

It's a tough call, but I'd preference the 302.

The reason that it's tough is because search engines will often treat 302s like 301s simply because webmasters implement them wrong so often.

The 302 is the correct choice. One thing I might consider is canonical tags pointing at the original URLs. This will hopefully give a "hint" to search engines what the correct URL is supposed to be.

With a straight 301, you generally lose about 15-20% of your search visibility. You may risk some loss with any type of redirect, but hopefully when things return to normal after a couple weeks everything will go back to square one.

Hope this helps!

[TVFreak]

Thanks that what I thought but in the end I made a recommendation against doing anything and keep the website as is.

It seemed too risky.