Temporarily redirect a blog page to a landing page - the back in 6 months

[sspinolaNG]

We have a PDF that contains a link to a page in our blog to view the footnote references. We want to initially make the PDF available for download on a campaign landing page for an exclusive period without making the blog page live. After this exclusivity period, we want to make the blog page live, but not until then.

The trouble is, if the blog page is not live when the PDF is downloaded from the campaign landing page, the user will receive an error.

Without creating 2 versions of the PDF (one with a references URL for the campaign and another for the blog) what would be the most efficient way to handle this?

The obvious answer is to use a 302 redirect but I've read that crawlers will eventually treat this like a 301 if it's in place for a long time, though I don't know what "a long time" is.

My other thought is to publish the blog page set it somehow to not display in the blog and not indexed. Is that possible?

Thoughts appreciated.

[sspinolaNG]

Thanks for the responses guys. They're truly appreciated. To answer @Phil_Vallender's question and both or your comments:

• Yes, the landing page will have the necessary references. To get back there, though (if anyone's even inclined to do so), they'd likely click the blog URL in the PDF. They could conceivably get back to the landing page through the email that originally led them there, but there's no clear statement anywhere that the references are there so they would have to have seen them on the landing page to know.
• While I agree that redirecting someone from a different URL back to the landing page for the citations is not ideal, I disagree that it's "bad UX (at best)" (as @MFrankJohnson says) — I don't think it's something that many people would even notice, tbh.

Also, there are a couple of details I didn't make clear initially:

1. The PDF is oferred as premium content for 6 months only, then it becomes evergreen. That's why I don't make the blog URL live for 6 months.
2. To prevent our having to create new PDF versions for every campaign (we also use them in ADs), we use the same file everywhere because...
3. We track campaigns with a landing page/CTA combo.
4. After the campaign is over, the campaign landing page URL remains active even though it's no loner promoted, so there won't ever be any redirects FROM that landing page to anywhere.

The only reason this is an issue is because the PDF file contains a link to the blog URL for accessing the references (and I don't want to maintain duplicate files) so it needs to be accessible during the campaign even though the page is not live yet. After the campaign is over and the blog page is active, we want the blog URL contained in the PDF to go to its "home" — the blog page.

Given all this, I think @MFrankJohnson's solution might be a bit complicated for our needs. The 302 redirect is probably our simplest and best bet unless someone has a strong argument otherwise.

[MFrankJohnson]

Help other HubSpot searchers find this post quickly by accepting this solution today.

Q: Temporarily redirect a blog page to a landing page - then back in 6 months?

Short A: n/a

Longer A:

Ok, so we completely agree with @Phil_Vallender insomuch as redirecting a visitor back to the landing page they originally converted on is bad UX (at best). That being said, our solution will still certainly allow you to do that if you so desire.

Take a look at this [eBook] Article Portfolio ...

At the bottom of most pages you'll find a faux menu of links -- About | FAQs | Testimonials. Hover over those links and read each URL before you click on it. They're basically subdomains used to redirect at the DNS level.

Using this method of DNS-level redirection in eBook content allows you to ...

-1- publish your ebook content with KNOWN URLs at time of publication -- no waiting for guys like us to build you custom URLs ... your content people will LOVE you.

-2- keep the links used at publication time up-to-date even if your target destination URLs change -- i.e., your use case. This allows you to publish today while having your update 6 months from now affect all those copies already downloaded.

-3- help secure your content from thieves ... beyond the scope of this discussion / forum.

Try it. Works like a charm.

Always happy to help. Reach out anytime if we can be of assistance with HubSpot.

Best,
Frank

---

www.MFrankJohnson.com

[Phil_Vallender · Accepted solution]

Hi @sspinolaNG

Other's here may be able to give you a more technically precise answer than I. But in your situation, given that your considerations seem to more around providing a good user experience, rather than trying maintain SEO, I would go ahead and redirect the unpublished blog post using a 302 (since it is temporary). When you remove the redirection, resubmit the post URL to Google. That way, people clicking the link in the PDF will get to the blog post and, eventually, Google should index it again. 

You can not (I don't think) configure just one post to not be indexed by Google. 

My question would be, what will you forward the post to? Will the references exist on the landing page? Reader may find it strange to click a link and be taken back to the landing they already converted on.

Hope this helps.