301 Redirect Improvements Are Here!

At LearningCart we are obsessed with the small details that ultimately help our customers sell more. We recently spent several days working on releasing updates to improve SEO performance for our customers who are using our URL redirect feature.

Out of the box, LearningCart allows you to redirect one URL to another. This can be very handy for setting up vanity URLs that are easy for people to remember. It’s also great if you are moving from another system and want to redirect old links to the new page in LearningCart. If you haven’t checked out that feature it is available in the admin under Site Utilities > Manage Redirects.

It recently came to our attention that in some instances this feature was sending a 302 redirect response to browsers instead of 301. Now to end-users, this makes absolutely no difference. Everyone ends up on the appropriate page… but to search engines, this is a big deal. Google for example when it receives a 302 redirect generally will not index the following page because 302 redirect indicates a page has just temporarily moved. A 301 redirect, on the other hand, tells Google the page it ends up is the new permanent location that should indeed be indexed.

Now at the end of the day to most people, these are all minor technical details. From our perspective though, they are terribly important! SEO performance is a core part of most of our customers' marketing strategy and in an increasingly competitive world. You want to leverage every possible advantage you can. So of course, we fixed it and silently rolled out the update. 

We are consistently looking for opportunities to improve our platform and help our customers better compete and succeed. We have some much bigger changes on the near horizon and look forward to introducing those in the coming months.