arubicus - 4:08 pm on Oct 18, 2005 (gmt 0)

“I have heard some reports of people having issues with doing a 301 ... but we may be due to replace the code that handles that in the next couple months or so. “

Around the time they were messing with 302 redirects a buch of stuff started to happen with 301 redirects. My site happened to disappear from the index about that time when I noticed this stuff happening. I did have an opportunity to send G-engineers a bunch of examples of these poorly handled 301s. I haven’t heard anything back – like usual.

What I did see is old 301 pages being resurrected with the design of the new pages they redirect to in which the old pages have NEVER seen such a design. This creating an exact duplicate of the new page in their index. At the time our site was disappearing from the index OLD 301 pages appeared with old cache dates but of our newest design (the old page never seen that design at any point in history) at the same time the newer version started to disappear from the index.

To make matters worse external 301 redirects (tracking scripts) also appeared in the index with a cache of the page that contains the URL to the tracking 301 script creating yet another duplicate of a page under a separate URL. Imagine tons of these redirects and the possible effects.

My main concern is whether Google would treat all those old pages as some sort of dupe content or not. If they do, could there be tons of dupe content especially if a webmaster makes huge directory changes? If they don’t treat them as the same page but separate then what impact (such as orphans) would it have on pagerank and such if they never get rid of them – or – does Google just ignore the old but keep it around for, hmmmmm ever? If it does ignore then what is up with what I described in the first paragraph?

I am also wondering if this little trick described in this thread could possibly help to alleviate some of these G-generated problems. Maybe if I resurrect some of or old pages but slapping some junk on them for a while then 404/410 the darn things - at least this could help get rid of possible G-generated dupes and effects of such (if any).