302 redirects showing ultimate domain

302 temp redirects showing more ultimate url's

[t2dman]

I have a number of domains that I use 302 redirects back to a mother site. Over the last two weeks, I have noticed more of them showing the mother site on the serps, rather than the usual initial domain. Given that they are duplicate results, Google hasn't until now shown the mother page. The only change on my part has been to change links to the internal pages, to the client domains (that then get redirected back to the mother site).

It is a good idea for Google as it gets rid of more dup pages, but now I have got to create unique pages for the client domains, so that from a marketing perspective they can see their domains up top of the SERP's.

Has anyone else noticed this?

[superscript]

I have a number of domains that I use 302 redirects back to a mother site

And you think this is OK?

[t2dman]

When you work within the Google rulz as they stand - yes. Google changes, you change. But first its good to check out what others have experienced.

[claus]

I've noticed this too - there are some strange bugs here and there (which are not really strange bugs at all given the variations in web servers and different ways to do things), but overall they've improved on this.

<sidenote>
It seems there is a bug when the 302 redirect cannot be followed [webmasterworld.com] for some reason. I hope they are also working on that bug with the 301's [webmasterworld.com] so that you can redirect multiple pages permanently to one new location (and not just one-to-one) - it's a bit silly to have to do it the temporary way [webmasterworld.com] when the changes are permanent in nature.
</sidenote>

It's the right thing to do. A redirect should not appear in the SERPS by itself as it's not a page, only a placeholder for that page. OTOH, this requires frequent spidering as a 302 is temporary by definition but with the massive amount of googlebots around since summer, this should no longer be a problem.

Also, it should not be interpreted as duplicate pages. In the case of a 302 redirect, there is only one page and not two. The redirect domain does not really "exist" as a domain, as it's just a pointer to something else.

Anyway, this is seriously good news for many webmasters with multiple domains for bad spelling or copyright/brand names and so on.

/claus

---

Added: Just tested a few, not all: I have one 302 domain that has it's own incoming links (very few of them, it's an abbreviation that some like to use for the site), and that one is not merged, it's just buried deep deep down in the serps unless you search specifically for it, which is okay with me. The domains that do not have their own incoming links seem to be merged - and then there are a few that Google does not know about, which doesn't really matter as i don't want them indexed anyway.

[t2dman]

Google certainly keeps you on your toes. You have "perfect" SERPS, great snippets etc, then another change and you have to do more tweeks. I will probably create separate pages instead of the redirects, have them ever so slightly different to the mother page. A little different to you Claus, since I want the domained pages to be top. There is a little more clickability to a clients own domain than going through to my domain.

Latest listing of a mother rather than redirect was spidered 19 Dec.