Do 302s Give GBot a Problem...

...when it should be getting 404s

[Robber]

So, lets say you have a site along the following lines:
* 50000 pages
* 10 months old
* PR5
* Constant spidering from Google
* 5/6k uv/day

You decide that some of those pages are a bit of a waste of space as they are just pulling in Amazon results and not really helping anyone so you ditch them, resulting in maybe 20000 pages that no longer exist.

Things carry on as normal for 2/3 months.

Then, you notice googlebot stops coming by and over the next month traffic gradually falls.

About a month later the site gets a PR0 and traffic is around 200/300 uv day mostly from other sites linking to it.

I just noticed on this server that whilst the the apache ErrorDocument is setup correctly the 404 page includes some php which uses:
header("Location:...............");

What I didnt consider until yesterday is that this php header function sends out a 302.

So, could the PR0 be a result of GBot receiving 302s rather than 404s on all of those thousands of pages that got deleted? The 302 point to the homepage so I am wondering if the PR0 could be due to a perceived duplicate content penalty due to the 302s.

Cheers

[caveman]

Robber, you have 20,000 internal 302 redirects pointing to your homepage? Yikes. 302's are *temporary* redirects. I would think that pointing 20,000 defunct pages of a site temporarily to the homepage might be frowned up by the SE's.

They should have been 301's. But I must say that we've never pointed 20,000 redirects to a homepage, even 301's, so I'm not sure what effect that might have. I guess technically it's OK, but I might worry about it even with 301's, given all the problems with redirects at the SE's.

You might find this thread helpful:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Perhaps someone who has handled a large volume of 301's will be able to comment.

[Robber]

Thanks for that Caveman, thats exactly what I was thinking - if I was the search engine I certainly wouldn't be impressed! Glad I realised this when I did as we were using this setup across quite a few sites - it seemed like the easiest way to direct visitors requesting a non-existent page back to the homepage.

So for anyone else out there using php header function to send all 404s to homepage be careful because the client/spider wont see the 404, they will get the 302 from the header function.

If anyone has got any firm info on whether this could ontribute to a PR0 I'd be quite interested to hear it.

Cheers