Do 302 temporary redirect harm?

[LauraHT]

Hi,

It shows that there are thousands of Pages with Temporary Redirect in the moz report on our site as medium priority. How hard do they affect the site's seo performance?

Thanks for any advice

[PeaSoupDigital]

A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect and should only be used if you want to redirect your site visitors to another page for a short period time. Ultimately, you will remove the 302 once it has served its purpose. As this is only a temporary redirect, it will not pass its 'link juice' to the target page as Google thinks you'll be removing it after so long.

If you plan on removing these 302s in the near future, then it should be fine. However, if you're wanting customers to be redirected permanently then you should change these to 301 redirects.

Also, if you have tons of redirects it could affect your site's speed/performance.

Thousands of 302 redirects doesn't sound quite right, though, so I'd pull all of the 302s, review them and see which ones need removing or changing to 301s.

[LauraHT]

Hi,

Thanks. How about a 302 redirect to login when visitor click to view the account profile? Do it harm too?

[PeaSoupDigital]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but if you want to redirect a visitor permanently you should be using a 301.

[LauraHT]

Sorry if I didnt explained it clear. When a visitor click on the account page without login they will be redirect 302 to login page to input their login detail. I've seen lots of site using 302 redirect on this.

[PeaSoupDigital]

I think a 302 should be OK in this instance, but you may want to wait for a response from a more technically minded Mozzer. However, if there are thousands of 302s, I imagine there are quite a few others that will need looking at.

[Hutch42]

You can also solve this by making the account and log in sections not crawled in your robots.txt.

[LauraHT]

Hi,

Thanks for the info above. I've checked the report in MOZ again. Among the thousands of medium priorities many of them are false alarm as they don't have redirect at all when I test. Many of them are 404 (not found) redirects when page/url no long exist.

here is what google says about 404 (not found) redirect:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?ctx=MCE&ctx=NF

It says it's normal and do not harm the seo performance. Do I just ignore the according alarm?

Thanks