Does 301 vs 302 matter when dealing with "social signal"?

[JDatSB]

When looking at links and how search engines look at "social signal," does it matter if a link is 301 vs 302?

In addition to that, if I build out my own short URL system that gets used for link redirects that include referral attributes, would/could I get penalized if I use 301 instead of 302?

[spencerhjustice]

It's hard to understand exactly what you're asking but I'll try to answer anyways.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and passes link juice.

A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect and does not pass link juice.

There are very few situations where you would use a 302 redirect instead of a 301 redirect. I've never advised anyone to use a 302.

Unless you're doing something manipulative I highly doubt you would be penalized for using a 301 redirect. Note that Bitly uses 301 redirects.

Here's a great Moz resource to check out on the topic of redirects.

[RobertFisher]

I think Spencer answers this well. You also have to ask, what is the issue with social signals that you are worried about? The only application I could think of is you want to redirect, not pass link juice (like with a page with a lot of poor quality links) but want to maintain social signals to that url.

I am going to guess that the 302 would not work for passing social as well.

Best,

[David-Kley]

Please provide an exact example of what you are trying to do, or planning to do. That will allow you to get much better advice.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Jonathan,

I think I understand what you're asking - you're asking if it matters for social signals if a link out from a social media website (be it Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.) goes through a 301 or a 302 redirect, e.g. a bit.ly link goes through one 301 to get to the target page, right?

Unfortunately, I don't know whether a 301 or 302 has any influence over how Google treats links from social media (which are usually also nofollowed, but we're talking purely about social signals here). I can only speculate that if I were Google and I wanted to look at social signals as opposed to SEO ranking signals, I would not take into account whether the redirect was a 301 or a 302.

If I were building my own tool to do this, I'd absolutely use 301s just because they are best practice for SEO, so you're going to get the benefit of the 301 if the link comes from somewhere other than a nofollowed social media site. There would be no reason to penalise a URL shortener or its target URLs for this.

[RobertFisher]

Jane,

Frankly, when I read your response I was a bit dismayed at myself. I think you zeroed in much better than anyone else did.

In his question Jonathan adds an interesting qualifier: "...own short URL system that gets used for link redirects that include referral attributes, would/could I get penalized if I use 301 instead of 302?" (italics are mine and are used to highlight the qualifier).

You state, "There would be no reason to penalise a URL shortener or its target URLs for this."

Don't you think that would be dependant on the "referral attributes" he is adding?

Best,

Robert

[JDatSB]

That's exactly what I'm looking at, thank you Jane.

@Robert, the "referral attributes" would not be passed through as parameters, but maybe as session data instead, therefor providing stronger SEO benefit.

Very thorough, thank you Jane

[JaneCopland]

Hi Robert,

Jonathan has said that nothing will be passed as parameters, but even if they were, I don't see that there would ever be a _penalty _for this (in the true sense of a penalty - algorithmic or manual penalisation for spam). You could flood Google with a million query strings and no canonicalisation if you did it badly which could get dangerous, is the only thing I can think of and even then, this would be easy to fix with canonicalisation on your own sites.