The baseball season is almost upon us, and I’m looking forward to the cry of “Playball” from the umpires. I also want to see Daisuke Matsuzaka, who joined the Red Sox this year, and his mythical gyroball. I’m also rooting for Josh Hamilton to turn his life around with the Cincinnati Reds.
A little over a year ago, Matt Cutts used a baseball example to talk about how search engines might handle something known as a 302 redirect.
When someone types in http://www.sfgiants.com into their browser address bar, they are taken to that page, and then redirected to another page with a much uglier address: http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=sf
That happens because the server that you visit, when you type in the sfgiants.com page, has an instruction in it to redirect visitors to the different address. There are a couple of different kinds of redirects – a temporary one, and a permanent one. The temporary one, which uses a server code of 302, is supposed to be an indication that the new address is only temporary. The permanent one uses a server code of 301.
When Google or Yahoo indexes a page and finds a redirect, they know that the address of the page has changed to a new address. The difficulty they then face is deciding whether to show the old address in their search results or the new address to where the page is being redirected.
With a temporary (302) redirect, it might be a good idea for them to keep the old address because the new one might go away. With a permanent redirect (301), they might decide to show the new address. Matt followed up his post on redirects, with another that detailed more fully what happens when there is a 302 redirect in place, and Google is indexing a page.
Ideally, if you use a redirect to another page, it’s not a bad idea to use a permanent (301) redirect, especially if people have linked to the old address. In most cases, its recommended and can help the new address be recognized as the permanent address for the page, and can result in passing along link popularity or PageRank scores to the new address.
Matt’s example from the official Major League Baseball (MLB) page for the San Francisco Giants left me curious as to what would show up at number one, in searches for major league baseball teams at Google and Yahoo, so I took a look. I decided to just use the American League teams.
The MLB pages showed up number one for all of the following team searches in Google and Yahoo. But the URLs that each search engine displayed were different. The pages that you end up upon when you click upon those links were also (mostly) different – the shorter MLB addresses are still using 302 redirects, instead of 301 redirects.
Baltimore Orioles orioles.mlb.com/
Boston Red Sox redsox.mlb.com/
Chicago White Sox whitesox.mlb.com/
Cleveland Indians indians.mlb.com/
Detroit Tigers tigers.mlb.com/
Kansas City Royals royals.mlb.com/
Los Angeles Angels angels.mlb.com/
Minnesota Twins twins.mlb.com/
New York Yankees yankees.mlb.com/
Oakland Athletics athletics.mlb.com/
Seattle Mariners mariners.mlb.com/
Tampa Bay Devil Rays devilrays.mlb.com/
Texas Rangers rangers.mlb.com/
Toronto Blue Jays bluejays.mlb.com/
Yahoo
Baltimore Orioles baltimore.orioles.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=bal
Boston Red Sox www.redsox.com
Chicago White Sox chicago.whitesox.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=cws
Cleveland Indians www.indians.com
Detroit Tigers detroit.tigers.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=det
Kansas City Royals www.kcroyals.com
Los Angeles Angels www.angelsbaseball.com
Minnesota Twins www.minnesotatwins.com
New York Yankees www.yankees.com
Oakland Athletics www.oaklandathletics.com
Seattle Mariners www.seattlemariners.com
Tampa Bay Devil Rays www.devilrays.com
Texas Rangers www.texasrangers.com
Toronto Blue Jays www.bluejays.com
I was a little surprised that the MLB pages all ended up at number one in the results for both Google and Yahoo. I don’t know why Yahoo decided not to show the shorter URLs for Baltimore, Chicago, and Detroit – the shorter addresses do exist. I also thought that it was interesting the Google chose one version of a shorter URL, and Yahoo chose another.
When you search for [Boston Red Sox], Google shows redsox.mlb.com/ as the MLB address, and Yahoo shows the www.redsox.com address. If you click upon either link to the page, you end up at this address: http://boston.redsox.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=bos through the use of a 302 redirect.
If MLB were to switch to a permanent redirect (301) to send visitors to these shorter addresses to the official URL, would we not see the shorter URLs in Google and Yahoo? I don’t know. Is the use of the temporary redirect hurting their rankings? Maybe, though it’s hard to get higher than number one in results.
People are linking to these shorter URLs. Yahoo Site Explorer shows 72,310 inbound links to www.redsox.com. MLB may be losing the benefit of link popularity or PageRank because of their use of the temporary redirect. While that doesn’t appear to be hurting them when it comes to ranking for the names of the teams, might it hurt them for other related searches?
I decided to investigate further.
Every team has an Allstar representative player each year, either elected or appointed. I decided to take a look to see if the top-ranking page for one Allstar from each of the American League teams was a major league baseball page or some other page.
After each team and Allstar below, I list the source of the top-ranked page. MLB didn’t fare so well:
Baltimore Orioles Miguel Tejada Google ESPN Yahoo ESPN
Boston Red Sox David Ortiz Google ESPN Yahoo ESPN
Chicago White Sox Paul Konerko Google ESPN Yahoo ESPN
Cleveland Indians Grady Sizemore Google MLB Yahoo Yahoo
Detroit Tigers Ivan Rodriguez Google ESPN Yahoo ESPN
Kansas City Royals Mark Redman Google Baseball-reference.com Yahoo ESPN
Los Angeles Angels Vladimir Guerrero Google ESPN Yahoo ESPN
Minnesota Twins Joe Mauer Google ESPN Yahoo Yahoo
New York Yankees Derek Jeter Google Wikipedia Yahoo MLB
Oakland Athletics Barry Zito Google ESPN Yahoo Wikipedia
Seattle Mariners Ichiro Suzuki Google ESPN Yahoo MLB
Tampa Bay Devil Rays Scott Kazmir Google ESPN Yahoo ESPN
Texas Rangers Michael Young Google Michael-young.com (nonbaseball) Yahoo ESPN
Toronto Blue Jays Vernon Wells Google baseball-reference.com Yahoo ESPN
There are only three MLB number one results in there, and the Ichiro page at the top of the Yahoo results no longer exists. Sadly, it uses a 302 redirect to point to a “not found” (404) page, so it may remain in those results for a while until Yahoo figures out that the page is gone. That’s another potential problem with using 302 redirects like that.
Might the team pages that mention their Allstars have the potential to rank number one in a search for the Allstars names? Maybe. Since the 302 redirects don’t pass along PageRank or link popularity, the pages might not seem as important as they could be by the search engines. Then again, the pages may not also be seen as the most relevant pages in a search for the Allstars names.
But using a permanent redirect (301) might make a difference in rankings for the Allstars names. It might also mean losing the prettier URLs in Google and Yahoo.
Which would you choose?