: Does purposely linking to an invalid URL and then using 301 affect SEO? On a section of my site, I am currently using .htaccess rewrites to put the ID as part of the URL instead of in the

@Gloria169

What you are using there (the user helpful text at the end of the URL) are know as "slugs". One good way of handling those is through the use of the "canonical" meta tag, for example on this page, the question title is in the URL, but isn't completely needed, so there is a canonical link in the source:

<link rel="canonical"
href="http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/54799/does-purposely-linking-to-an-invalid-url-and-then-using-301-affect-seo" />


However you'll notice that there is also a 301 redirect to the full URL in place, and Google recommend this alongside the canonical link.

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@Megan663

You won't be able to have both your Swedish content and your English content crawled and indexed by Googlebot like that. You don't say how your are determining language. Googlebot doesn't send accept-language headers, so your redirects may not even work for Googlebot. If you are redirecting based on geographic location of the IP address, Googlebot will always get the English version.

The SEO problems with your setup are:


You should not use parameters for selecting language. Domain, sub-domain, and directory are the SEO approved ways of choosing language.
You should not automatically choose the language for users. Users need to be able to switch manually when your algorithm gets it wrong in cases like:


Travelling abroad and using local computers
International users with English browsers (very common)
Inaccuracies in geo-IP databases (also very common)

Googlebot needs to be able to crawl the site in all languages.


For more information see: How should I structure my URLs for both SEO and localization?

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@Cooney921

Does purposely and permanently having invalid URLs on your site that
get 301'ed to the correct ones have any effect on SEO? I could make it
just show the correct URL to begin with, but this is a significant
amount of work due to how I am handling the translations, so I would
prefer just to 301 them.


Arguably, yes. According to Google, a 301 redirect will pass about 85-90% of PageRank, which is about the same as an ordinary link. If every link on your site 301 redirects before reaching its destination, that effect is multiplied, i.e., if we assume 15% reduction, the destination page ends up with about 13% less PageRank than it otherwise would have (85% of 85% = ~72%).

It also adds unnecessarily to the total page load time which, depending how fast your server is, may have a perceptible negative effect for users which may have indirect SEO effects (see ShopZilla case study). If it's really slow, there's a chance of direct SEO effects in Google as page speed is a (very small) part of their ranking algorithm.

A final consideration that may compound both of the above, it sounds like your example links between /es/ and /en/ will encounter 2 redirects - once to the Spanish spelling, and again to add your parameter string. If that's right, then the multiplication is greater, i.e., the destination ends up with about 24% less PageRank, slower load, etc.


Will the invalid URLs that are contained in the links be added to the
search engine indexes even if they get 301'ed to another page?


No. Search engines should only index the destination of the 301 (Google example here).

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