What is the correct tracking URL redirection HTTP headers to use?

Seeing as Google has made a mess of its index :(

[dmorison]

There have been a number of posts recently regarding Google's inadvertent indexing of pages under tracking URLs - such as those used as the target URL in an Adwords or other PPC campaign.

I am now worried about taking a duplicate content hit.

In my scenario; my Adwords targetURL is something like:

[gateway.mydomain.com...]

redir is a PHP script that drops a cookie and then sends...

header("Location: [mydomain.com");...]

... which causes a 302 redirect. This seems to be the cause of this problem.

So, can anybody assert exactly what HTTP headers should be sent by a redirection script so that Google and other search engines do not end up indexing the page under the tracking URL?

[jdMorgan]

dmorison,

301-Moved Permanently will replace the current URL with the specified URL in both a browser and the search engine index.

Ref: [w3.org...]

HTH,
Jim

[dmorison]

Thanks, Jim.

Also picked up from another thread would be to exclude all robots from gateway.mydomain.com.

For future reference if anybody searches into this thread:

header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header("Location: [mydomain.com...]

Does the trick in PHP.