302 Redirect concern

[endomorph1]

I have been keeping an eye on my site stats lately and at the bottom of the list is HTTP Status codes

The worrying thing is at the top of the list is -

Type: 302 Moved temporarily (redirect)
Hits: 3987
B/W: 1.44 MB

As far as I know, I have not set up any 302 redirects. Should I be concerned?

[larryhatch]

Yes, definitely.

Search this forum (WW) for several long threads
related to 302 page highjacking and the like.

I would look thru your Access_log files for strange incoming referrers.
Note which pages they access.

Google for exact quotes of short phrases which are unique to the affected pages.
Don't be surprised if you click on an unfamiliar link and YOUR page comes up.

Google up Copyscape. That good service can turn up all sorts of nasty stuff.

- Larry

[endomorph1]

Thanks Larry, but what is a "strange incoming referrer" and what is not a "strange incoming referrer"

This may or may not have anything to do with it but when I look at the site useage by IP address, there is one IP who is taking twice as much as I am (as the webmaster).

It is very difficult to try and trace by using text from my site as the site is a forum.

[cornwall]

I believe Google have gone a long way to "solving" the 302 problem. So you may not have a problem at all

Do a quick "allinurl:www.mysite.com" and "allinurl:mysite.com" test and see what, if anything comes up under your own site.

If you find anything of concern, do a header check to see if they are feeding different things to Googlebot than to punters.

If you don't know how to do that, then just try and zap the 302 pointing at you using the instructions given by someone in that WebmasterWorld thread (it works, they are simple, but follow them exactly)

[endomorph1]

Doing a "allinurl:www.mysite.com" if fine but then I have to search through thousands and thousands of pages!

I had a quick scan this morning and I can't see anything else strange listed on there.

[motorhaven]

I normally don't dispute posts but you're being given the wrong answer to the right question (or the right answer to the wrong question). It appears there is a bit of ignorance here about the fundamentals of server logging and status codes.

While a periodic check on Google for 302 redirects to your site is a good thing, spotting a 302 in your logs does not mean there is a 302 redirect to your site. Your server cannot determine (and log) the status codes from other sites. This information is simply not available and is also not supplied by browsers (though browsers will give referrer information unless the user is blocking that).

What you are seeing in your logs is >>your<< server issuing a redirect. Your server can only log status codes it issues, not codes from other servers. There are many things that can do this. For instance:
1. Link software that does click tracking.
2. Banner ad software (most does click tracking.
3. Forum software that redirects you to another page.
4. Some shopping cart software (X-Cart for example redirects home page indexes to forward to home.php).
5. If you're using Apache, some rewrite rules will do this. Check those out.
6. Domain forwarding if you have more than one domain pointing to a single site.
7. Many other reasons.

Identify the page doing it and if it is redirecting to an external page add the nofollow tag to the href.

[endomorph1]

Motorhaven,

Thanks for that. Most of what you list, I have on the site.

Do I need to do anything is it just normal.

[motorhaven]

Go to your logs and find the file listed with the 302 error.

Put that URL into this header viewer page:

[delorie.com...]
(I'm not affiliated at all with the above page, I just find it to be an excellant resource.)

It will give you a complete list of the headers your browser is supplying. Also, if you can sticky me the log entry and the URL I can take a look as well.

Generally, 302's within the same domain aren't a problem. External 302s are the concern because they've had problems (as noted by others here) with page-hijacking.