Emmett - 11:27 pm on Mar 8, 2005 (gmt 0)

I'm actually getting traffic from google by a site that has their 302 redirect listed in the SERPS. They have a higher page rank so it's actually a benefit in a way because of more search traffic. In this case they are doing a direct jump to a sub page on my site when the link is clicked. However I think this will hurt my site in the long run when google decides that my page is a duplicate of theirs but I can't say for sure.

* I did notice one thing that makes it look like it would be so easy for google to figure out how to know which page is the original. *

When you click on the google cache of the redirect site link and check the properties of the images or links on the page it gets worked out to referringsite/uniqueimage.jpg or referringsite/dir/link.html

Those links would all return 404 page not found errors when google would index them so it seems to me that an easy fix for googlebot would be a formula like this:

if page.links = mostly 404s
then
page = not original
don't credit referring url to content
else
page = probably the original

Even if googlebot didn't keep the variables needed you could run some sort of process over the index to check for invalid links. I don't see why a search engine would want to list pages with tons of 404s anyway.

A less process intensive fix would be to just give us a new robots.txt entry that says "contentdomain=validsite.com".

Is it just me or wouldn't it be just that easy?

I'm sure that every webmaster who's been affected by this problem would be more than happy to add a line to robots.txt.

My 2 Cents