1373461 - Making the Firefox Hardware Report redirect a 301?

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Infrastructure & Operations Graveyard :: WebOps: Other, task)

Description

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

The old Firefox Hardware Report URL [1] currently 302 redirects to the new URL [2].

Do you see any downsides to making that a 301 redirect instead? That might help our SEO a bit. For example, Google still shows the old URL in its results [3] and having a 301 might convince them to use the new one instead.

[1] https://metrics.mozilla.com/firefox-hardware-report/
[2] https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/
[3] https://www.google.com/#q=firefox+hardware+report

Comment 1

[Joey Krejci [:joeyk]]

Hey John,

Not sure off the top of my head. I will consult with my team and get back to you shortly!

Comment 2

[Joey Krejci [:joeyk]]

So after speaking with my team it appears that the 301 is good if you don't plan on changing the URL, however if you foresee any URL changes in the next few months, etc a 302 would be best as 301's stick and it's quite the challenge to make them unstick. 

I'm no expert on SEO, so I'm gonna leave that decision up to you. Let me know what direction you wanna go and we can figure out how to move forward. Thanks!

Comment 3

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Yeah, we might change the URL in the future. There's been talk of putting the Hardware Report under the firefox.com domain. A 301 should still be fine in that case (we could further 301 from hardware.metrics.mozilla.org to the next one) but I guess it would hurt performance to have two 301s.

I'm happy to keep it as a 302. It was blocked from search engines for a long so we're nearly starting from SEO scratch anyway. Thanks for the feedback and quick response. :-)