Question

So evidently in 2010, Matt Cutts at Google revealed in an interview, along with a follow-up email exchange after the interview, that Google deducts page rank if you use domain-to-domain HTTP status 301 redirects. In other words, if you have examples.com and purchase example.com that redirects with an HTTP status 301 redirect to examples.com, Google has admitted that they will usually deduct PR for that.

Okay, so what’s left is HTTP status 302 and HTTP status 307 redirects. They say on wikipedia that 307 is the new way, and that HTTP status 302 was “bastardized” and not really the right way to do a redirect. Trouble is — do most browsers since IE6 support the HTTP status 307? See, I don’t have an IE6 browser around anymore to test.

So the question is — if we need to start using HTTP status 307 redirects, will it work in browsers released since IE6, as well as the IE6 browser?

Answer 1

I made the decision to use a 302 redirect, and here’s why:

• Google certainly can’t penalize the entire web for not using 307 redirect because, well, hardly anyone knows about it. Most products you can download and install still use 301 or 302 redirect. Or, if they simply use a header(‘Location: x’) call, that defaults to a 302 redirect anyway.
• Google has admitted (in the sources I provided in the original post) that 301 redirects are penalized if you’re using them for domain-to-domain redirects.
• If I want the largest acceptance in the browsers, the HTTP 302 status code is going to be more preferable at least for now instead of the HTTP 307. The HTTP 307 is the future, however, according to what I read. However, HTML5 is still the future too and as of 2012 it’s still not ready yet.