301 vs 302 redirect

[asmedia]

Hello Mozers,

I have a website which offers subscriptions on a monthly basis, when one profile expires the link of the profile gets a 301 redirect to the main category, just that if the member chooses to come back after a while he can reactivate the profile and the link will work again and the 301 will disappear,

Should I be doing  302 redirect, as from this point of view it's only a temporarily redirect ?

Thanks in advance

[artdivision]

Hello Ionut,

Since they are subscription profiles (and thus there isnt a link value concern) a 302 might be a better option at start.

The way I would do it is set a rule of permanent user expiration and say once someone does not renew for lets say 6 months or 1 year then I make a permanent 301, until then I leave it as a 302. The length of the month may vary but that's something your analytics will tell you.

[Chris.Menke]

Ionut, what specifically does the link go to and from originally and how often do members come back?

[asmedia]

Hello Chris, sorry for the lack of details, so the link caries value on each profile, there are inbound links coming to each profile from our social profiles from shares tweets pins and so on, so each profile carries a link weight but the way we structure the website : thewebsite/city/profile-name , and when the subscription expires it redirects from /city/profile-name to /city, so all the link juice will be carried to the city in question, as for the frequency it depends, we have profile being reactivated after 1 week or after 2-3 month ...

[asmedia]

Hello Yiannis,

Thanks for the response, I think this is the right way, as the profiles are erased after 6 month of inactivity ... never thought of it this way

[Everett]

I would use a 301.

Reason #1 - Some of those profiles are going to have external links, as Robert stated in his reply.

Reason #2 - A 302 will not remove the URL from the index like a 301 will. Over time you could end up with many more temporary redirects than actual pages, which may look pretty bad. I prefer not to bloat the index with URLs like that.

In the event that someone comes back you can remove the 301 redirect with no ill-effect. If it has been in place for a long time (e.g. a year or more) the profile page may not get its pagerank back from those older links, which would be fine.

Please also keep in mind that Google can choose to treat a 301 like a 404 if the content doesn't match up. This could easily happen with the situation you mention above. However, I don't really think there is any other option other than doing the 302. I'd  rather let it be treated as a 404 than a 302 if we're talking about user-generated pages here because they can get out of hand and bloat the index over time.

eCommerce sites that have products coming and going all the time have similar issues. Imagine if every product a store ever sold stayed indexed for years after the product was no longer available. Even if users are redirected I don't think this is an ideal situation.