302 to a page and rel=canonical back to the original (to preserve url juice)?

[dragonlawhq]

Bit of a weird case, but let me explain.

We use unbounce.com to create our landing pages, which are on a separate sub-domain (get.domain.com).
Some of these landing pages have a substantial amount of useful information and are part of our content building strategy (our content marketers are able to deploy them without going through the dev team cycle).

We'd like to make sure the seo page-juice is counting towards our primary domain and not the subdomain.
(It would also help if we one day stop using unbounce and just migrate our landing page content to our primary website).

Would it be an SEO faux-pas to do the following:
domain.com/awesome-page ---[302]---> get.domain.com/awesome-page
get.domain.com/awesome-page ---[rel=canonical]---> domain.com/awesome-page

My understanding is that our primary domain would hold all the "page juice" whilst sending users to the unbounce landing page - and the day we stop using unbounce, we just kill the redirect and host the content on our primary domain.

[DirkC]

It is a "faux pas". The problem with the solution you propose is that the canonical url you are pointing to doesn't exist (domain.com/awesome-page has status 302 = temporarily moved to another location). Check http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html  - best practices

• A large portion of the duplicate page’s content should be present on the canonical version.
• Double-check that your rel=canonical target exists

With the canonical you indicate that you prefer that domain.com/awesome-page is shown in the search results rather than get.domain.com/awesome-page - Google will however not put pages with 302 status in the search results

Not sure if it's possible - but the best solution would be to maintain both pages & put a canonical on unbounce.If that is not possible - just leave it as it is. The moment you stop working with unbounce you 301 these pages to the corresponding pages on the main domain.

Dirk

[dragonlawhq]

Hi Dirk,

Thanks for confirming our thoughts - we'll focus on building content for now, benefit where we can with our landing pages on sub-domains, and optimise further once we pull away from hosted solutions for content pages.