How does Bing manage redirects – 301s, 302s and the canonical tags?

Traditionally search engines treat redirects as follows:

• A 301 redirect informs a search engine that content has moved permanently to a new location. The search engine then passes the existing value of the old URL to the new URL. It’s important to know that the 301 redirect does not pass all of the value from an old URL to a new one.
• A 302 redirect informs a search engine that content has moved temporarily to a new location. The search engine then ensures the temporary new URL does not take on the old URL’s value but instead keeps it with the original URL.

Bing however announced in a recent post that “sometimes the real world forces us to make compromises.” Bing goes on to explain that there are situations that even though there is a 302 or 301 in place may be treated differently.

“We sometimes see 301s changing destination each time we crawl them.  In such cases, even though a 301 is in place, we tend to view them as 302 redirects.  The flip side to this is that we sometimes see 302s which are always linking to the same destination each time we crawl them, acting more like a 301 redirect.  So our system may think about them more like 301s as we continue to crawl them again and again.”

Naturally it is always best to provide the correct redirect and not to rely on the search engine to figure it out itself.

Bing also shared a few tips about the canonical tag:

• Do not self-reference the canonical tag. Only use it on a duplicate URL.
• If you do use the canonical tag as a place holder on a template for instance, again do not self-reference the URL but instead leave it blank
• “It doesn’t help Bing (us) trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages, yet correctly across a few others on your website”

Lastly on redirects a very useful tip from Bing was to avoid “mass redirects to a single page, as most won’t end up passing value… keep all redirects pointed to pages which are relevant to the original.  Skipping this step negates the value.”

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