Does a 302 from your domain root adversely effect your google ranking?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I have a site, http://www.zenslap.me, that does a 302 https://forum.tuteehub.com/tag/redirect">redirect to http://www.zenslap.me/welcome or http://www.zenslap.me/dashboard depending on whether or not a user is logged in. In other words I never show a page at the root address of http://www.zenslap.me. Is this going to have an adverse effect on my google ranking? Should I make sure that there is a viewable page available at http://www.zenslap.me?

manpreet 2 years ago

Remarkably, this is the only scenario where a 302 redirect of this kind won't nescessarily adversely affect you in terms of attribution of value - in fact it's preferable. Given that you want the true value of any links/value pointing to the root tag/domain">domain to reside at the root tag/domain">domain level (rather than at the redirected destination page) it makes sense to utilise a 302 rather than a 301, which would (in)correctly attribute any value pointing at site.com to site.com/homepage.

This is also much more future-proof - any changes to or resolution of the redirection setup later down the line won't result in any loss of value (other than value directly linking to / pointing to the specific page, rather than the root) which might occur if you were redcirecting child pages to the homepage.

Unfortunately, the question of canonisation comes up, where you're unavoidably going to get a split of value attribution between the root URL and destination page, and you'll naturally acquire links to both. In that scenario, you might struggle to recoup that value, as any artificial canonisation (e.g., through the canonical tag) may cause something of a redirect loop and in fact perpetuate the problem. It may be that Google et al are intelligent enough to recognise the intent behind canonisation a redirected root homepage the root URL - worth a try in the short term, and I'd monitor the results via www.opensiteexplorer.org, comparing the page authorities of the root tag/domain">domain URL vs the redirected homepage.