Every day we scour the web for crowdfunding-related content in hopes of surfacing the most important news and tips. This small tip is exhibit A in why we do this. Sometimes the most important points aren’t made on huge news sites.
On the blog Games on the Brain, Tim Harrison points out an extremely important reality some project creators face after a successful crowdfunding campaign. Note that Kickstarter and Indiegogo remove failed projects from search engines when possible. For an explanation of why that is, click here. Having said that, successful projects remain, and that isn’t always a good thing for project creators.
Why? Because sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo index extremely well, and a successful campaign can trump a project creator’s home page in popular search engines long after the campaign has stopped seeking funding.
So how does a project creator make certain a crowdfunding campaign page doesn’t outrank their home page? 302 redirects.
A 302 redirect is an HTTP status code that tells clients (and web crawlers) that a redirect is temporary. In other words, a crowdfunder’s homepage can be temporarily redirected to a crowdfunding campaign page, and that URL can and should be used in link marketing and social networking. A 302 redirect can send users from http://www.yoursite.com to http://www.kickstarter.com/your-project automatically, and search engines will know to look for an update down the road.
Once the campaign is over, the redirect can then be removed from that URL and all of those backlinks will point to the project creator’s domain, creating instant search engine credibility. This in turn should help a project creator’s home page outrank the crowdfunding campaign page in search.
Of course, the alternative is just to roll your own crowdfunding via Selfstarter, Crowdhoster or similar.