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I am currently working on a blog and the site is structued such that when you go to the url eg: www.example.com

you are redirected to

www.example.com/blog/10-10-2010/new-product-released.html (the url you are redirected to changes to the most recent blog entry).

I was using a sitemap generator and the url www.example.com is displayed as 302 temporarily moved and I wanted to know what the effect was of this in terms of seo, also what would be the best way to cget this working for effective seo?

Secondly, in terms of the sitemap should urls in a checkout area for an ecommerce app be included?

Ps. I am using Apache on CentOS.

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Nov 4 '11 at 4:30

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3 Answers 3

The best way to get your home page to display the latest blog post without 302 redirects would be to write a static homepage, that pulls in the content of the latest blog post. This is how most blogging CMS' work, they grab either the full post or a snippet from the latest few posts.

In terms of the cart page page being included in the sitemap I would generally exclude it as well as a few other pages that you don't want indexed. You may also want to disallow them in your robots.txt because they aren't of any value if indexed and letting Google and other SEs know they can ignore them theoretically gives you a better chance of having the content you want indexed crawled.

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A 302 redirect tells the visitor the page has temporarily moved. Note the temporarily part. This means that the next time a Google bot visits your site it will try to index the same url again until there is real content (200) or the bot is redirected to the new content (301).

A 301 redirect tells the visitor the page has moved. This will trigger Google bot not to index the url in the future, but store the url the redirect points to as the right page.

302 redirects are ment to be used temporarily.

As for the sitemap question. If you want visitos to end up on a checkout page without having placed any order you can go ahead and add the page to you sitemap. Otherwise leave it out.

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That is fine, you can also set up preferred domain your Google webmaster tools, and also I prefer you are including canonical tag in your pages so that Google spider understands which page you need to rank.

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