tedster - 10:53 pm on Jun 8, 2010 (gmt 0)

This new report also gives us a hint that such redirects may not even be doing any good for the target page.

True soft 404 pages (302 > 200) in the style of old-days Microsoft, seemed to stop getting websites into deep trouble a good while back. Back then was when we started to see googlebot doing test crawling of clearly non-existent urls to inspect the server response.

Now Google has pushed it one step further. This is a good thing, especially if the reports become quite dependable. It's past time to let go of any obsessive stranglehold on every bit of theoretical link juice. Times have definitely changed.