302 a Homepage?

[jrs79]

I am working with a site that wants to temporarily show a promotional landing page instead of their homepage. Theoretically you could do a 302, but what are the SEO implications of doing such a thing? I would appreciate any first hand experience or feedback on the idea. Ultimately it will not be my decision, but I do have influence.

As a side note, there homepage is a mess (visually displeasing) and they really need a new website. This is one of the reasons that they are leaning this way.

Thanks in advance for the feedback.

[lucy24]

There's a whole family of questions like this. It's always "What are the SEO implications of doing suchandsuch" where "suchandsuch" is something that's just about guaranteed to incur the hatred of every human visitor. You'd need a pretty hefty SEO advantage to outweigh the immediate disadvantage.

[tangor]

What is the rationale of doing a redirect on the homepage if you know it will be changed? Leave everything alone and develop that new page and then, when ready, roll it out to REPLACE the existing homepage.

Two reasons:

1, you are not creating any SEO issue which might come by using redirects

2. You can use that roll out date to begin analytics to see where any SEO actually works or does not work.

You avoid that "limbo" period where the redirect has introduced other data for analysis.

[jrs79]

Thank you for the replies. They are appreciated. I think that I have talked them out of it. I realized shortly after posting that is is an XY problem.

[seoskunk]

Test the new page using A/B testing in adwords first, if adwords punters like it let it go live.

[Leosghost]

You could run a script on the server to serve alternate index pages every hour , or two hours,..or to serve the alternate index page to every second visitor...test for a day..see which gets the better visitor response..no need to spend money on adwords :)