302 redirect for domain root - from Google's JohnMu

[tedster]

From Google's JohnMu (John Mueller), here's some confirmation of a practice I've been noticing over the years. If you are redirecting your domain root to an inner URL in order to serve your home page, then a 302 is the best kind of redirect, not a 301.

For what it's worth, a 302 redirect is the correct redirect from a root URL to a detail page (such as from "/" to "/sites/bursa/"). This is one of the few situations where a 302 redirect is preferred over a 301 redirect.

Google Webmaster Central Forum [google.com]

I've seen this in action and wondered about Google's preference. The 302 always seemed to help, not hurt. So now we know. Using a 302 helps to keep the domain root in the index, with the content ranked according to the target URL.

Thanks to Search Engine Roundtable [seroundtable.com] for calling out this Google Forum thread.

[tedster]

I should add that John continues, saying it's still better to avoid the redirect altogether, when you can, that is.

I have seen some complex corporate infrastructures where avoiding the redirect was a LOT of trouble. For some reason, Java developers using JSP on Tomcat often run into this situation when they use multiple hostnames with a domain. I've seen other examples, too, but the Java thing seems to be common.

[g1smd]

Matt Cutts also mentioned this several years ago in passing.

[bowdeni]

I have a question regarding this.

If you use a 302 in this instance, and 302s do not pass link juice, does one lose the link juice from links that point to the root domain? Or are they passed to the URL that serves the content?

[tedster]

I've worked with several large web infrastructures that used the 302 from the domain root - the PageRank stayed on the domain root for all of them.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

IMO, using redirect other than 301 would not pass Pagerank but at the same time would not even destroy it. In other words it would be retained for the page.

[tedster]

Right. One of the common uses of the 302 from the domain root is on a multi-lingual site, where an international company uses the IP address to 302 redirect to the country version that looks correct.
If they used a 301, the home page (domain root) would no longer show up in navigational search results looking for that exact company.

As long as there is a direct way for the user to go to another country version when they want to, it works pretty well. Google crawls completely from US IP addresses, but then they can follow those direct links to crawl all the versions.