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This is a good idea, but a bad design. First, it unduly burdens the server, in sending multiple redirects to cover the entire search space of possible versions
by throwanem 6y ago
This is a good idea, but a bad design.
First, it unduly burdens the server, in sending multiple redirects to cover the entire search space of possible versions of a URL - for a mature site, this could be a lot of redirects. It also unduly burdens the client, in following them, and the network between the two.
Second, 302 is the wrong type of redirect to use here, because it is temporary; a well-tempered user agent will treat it as such, necessitating the same cascade of redirects on followup visits. The right way to do this is with a 301, which has a semantic of permanency, and is treated as such by user agents. But it's still the wrong thing to do.
Maintaining access to older versions of websites is, again, an entirely desirable thing to do. But if you're going to do it in a way that requires work on the server (as this design also does), you're better off just having the server maintain version information and serve the latest available page at a given URL, in a 200 response, when the URL is accessed.
- mudita 6y agoI don't have any opinion on whether 302 or 301 is the better choice, I'd just like to point out that using 302 seems to have been a deliberate decision: from https://4042302.org/how/ https://4042302.org/how/ : >We use a 302 and not a 301 (permanent redirect) because we want the latest site to have the chance to override the URL in the future.
- Jaruzel 6y agoGoogle treats 302s and 301s differently when it crawls. A 302 is effectively ignored and the search index isn't updated - the original URL that threw the 302, is left in. Whereas 301s result in the new redirect target URL replacing the original in the search index. By filling up your sites with nested 302s (following this to it's conclusion, in ~10 years time), is not only a management headache, but may fall foul of Google (I'm not sure nested 302s, will send positive signals to Google) and result in your whole site being de-indexed.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]