Diary of a Market Hacker

Network Solutions using 302 redirect on E-commerce customer sites.

Recently a new client was referred to me.  He was having a difficult time getting his site to rank after taking over the site from the previous owner and having the rankings drop significantly.  We discovered several problems that made his situation what it is. That is, hopeless until the problem gets resolved.

His site had been indexed using http and https urls at some point in the past.  He had duplicate content problems there, but that is not is main issue. When he took over the site he moved it to the Network Solution E-commerce platform. Network Solutions uses 302 temporary redirects to to divert content from https URLs to the non-secure version of the page.  While redirecting https URLs to http URLs is a good idea, it’s a really bad idea to tell the search engines that it’s only temporary.   Basically, what NS is doing to say “hey G, Y, M, et al. I don’t want you to index this page.  In fact it’s probably going to go away.  For now, use this page (http version), but only temporarily.”   In essense they’re saying that both pages are in flux and niether is the page that you really want to put forth for the world.

He struggled to get NS to actually understand the problem until speaking with the, apparently, the king stud of SEO at Network Solutions.  He acknoledged the problem but gave no solution and no ETA.  He just said, they’d find a solution.  That was over 2 weeks ago.  As I write this, the problem still exists.   I hope, for his sake and the good of all the Network Solutions E-commerce customers they fix the problem and stop using the 302 for this.