How does RedirectToRoute affect SEO?

Question

So I have my domain - www.mycatchyname.com, and its basically a single page site that has one purpose, so I've used RedirectToRoute on the root controller/action to go straight to www.mycatchyname.com/seo-keyword. So www.mycatchyname.com/seo-keyword is basically the homepage.

How does Google see this? People searching for what my site is actually about will probably pickup www.mycatchyname.com/seo-keyword in the results, however some people will be going to www.mycatchyname.com directly. Will both instances be indexed and have seperate pageranks/entries on the results page? What kind of a redirect is RedirectToRoute?

Is there a better way to do what I'm trying to do, aside from straight up having www.seo-keyword.com, because that isn't an option.

Answer 1

ASP.NET uses a 302 redirect (temporary redirect) in this instance. You might be better off using a 301 (permanent redirect) but you will have to create your own ActionResult and return it from your action method.

Answer 2

I believe a 301 redirect would be better in terms of SEO for what you are trying to do. Here is one way that you can create a permanent redirect action result:

public class PermRedirectResult : ActionResult
{
    private string _url;

    public PermRedirectResult(string url)
    {
        _url = url;
    }

    public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)
    {
        context.HttpContext.Response.RedirectPermanent(_url, true);
    }
}

You can then call it in your controller like this:

public ActionResult Index()
{
    return new PermRedirectResult("www.mycatchyname.com/seo-keyword");
}

Hope this help you.

Answer 3

This might be a issue for your SEO.

ASP.Net MVC uses a 302 whenever you return a RedirectToRouteResult or a RedirectResult. This means that your new page might not get indexed.

• 301 means Permanent redirect (as in: forget the old page and url)
• 302 means Temporarly redirect (as in: index the original url, but with the target url's information)

So, use a 301 redirect on the homepage if you don't want to get this indexed.

On top of this: because you are creating 2 URL's with the same content, you are creating duplicate content. Having a single URL for each page is pretty important (look up canonical URL meta tag).