302 redirects, canonicalise or redirect (301)?

[eLab_London]

Hey Guys,

I am fairly new to 'technical' SEO as I was lucky enough in my old role to have technical expertise in the team for things like this, now I am learning myself and it is a slow and painful process, so your expertise is soooo much appreciated! My I.T. dept say that I have 3 instances on my website where the Hybris platform is creating a 302 redirect automatically - the first:

1. URL doesn't exist - Hybris creates a temp 302 - the system does not create case sensitive url's

| http://www.example.fr/Example/Marques/0180/brand/CHANEL | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 |

| http://www.example.fr/Example/Marques/0015/brand/Giorgio-Armani | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 |
| http://www.example.fr/fr/Example/marken/0507/brand/lancome | URL doesn't exist | TRUE | 302 |

I believe these are being redirected due to the fact that capital letters are being created in the url.

2. Multi-lingual redirects

I have a German and French version of my site and whenever any switches from one URL to the other using our language selector a 302 is created.

3. Dynamic URL elements

Dynamic url elements and special characters are being created in the URL, I am not sure where this is happening, but my I.T. department would like me to go and see whether this is something that can be created by a browser.

If anyone has any similar problems or have any advice or insights even, I would love to hear from you! Thanks

[eglove]

Do a 301, there's no need to create more content just to canonicalize it. 302's aren't too bad, but the permanent redirect is best practice.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I recommend learning the best practices for redirects, as well as hreflang attributes and language tags - you should also read into country targeting your sites in Google and Bing - this is a big deal for international SEO and targeting.

I would also look into your dynamic URLs by reading through this resource from Google on potential duplicate content - this will help you categorize and manage your URLs, helping Google understand their purpose. You should also check your internal links and sitemap to make sure that there are not dynamic URLs listed there.

This will require your web development team as well, so make sure they read and understand these resources, both for current and future situations. Some of this has the tendency to get pretty technical and indepth so if you need help, know that Moz has a fantastic Recommended Companies page to help.

That being said, 301 redirects are preferred by search engines, 302s passes 0% link juice and most cases should not be used, and all URLs (and their dynamic variations) should have a canonical tag to the preferred URL.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[eLab_London]

Thanks Patrick,

This is indeed helpful. I have read these links; SO:

• Redirects should be 301.

• I need to add href lang tags (for google and bing) on my website and I need to look more into geo targeting in more detail.

- Do you recommend I need to find out why these urls are being created? and yes this has also crossed over with the duplicate content project we are running too. But 301's are a solution until I figure out why these url's are being created so we can get it fixed.

I will check the sitemap today.

Thanks for your advice

[eLab_London]

Thank you Ethan, Yes I will recommend a 301 redirect to the I.T. guys, but I do think that my I.T. guys wont like me much

Please can I ask - why would I need to create more content to canonicalise it if I already have two url's? Would I not just add code to both pages?

If the page 1 url exists and temp redirects it to the page 2 url, would I not just add code to both pages? Or if I add code to the page 1 url, would it be exactly the same to the other variations?

Please teach me this as I will need to explain it to the I.T. dept as this was there recommendations. I think I will most definitely need tech help moving forward!

Thanks a lot for your time!