Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Anyone any ideas?
The 302's on the companies site I was thinking about and looking at a year or so ago moved all of thier sub domains over to new a new php format. It might well have been that google spotted these 302's and said hello this is duplicated and not taken the 302 to mean what it is supposed to mean .. this page has temporarily moved.
I now am suffering a similar problem .. I moved servers and without my knowledge the servers I was on had all the non www as a 302 pointing to the non www in the correct place on my new server but not having put up 301s on my new server I was given a massive penalty ... from no 1 in serps on most sites to 500+
These 302s were up without my knowledge for about 3 or 4 months and now they have been taken down but .. I would say ... that this is a 302 penalty. If you tell a robot the information has moved for a while it should recognise that and not penalise you imo. Apache have given you 302's for a reason and google doesnt seem to understand that.
I cant say that I am 100% percent sure that this is the only reason I was penalised as I also was doing alot of cross linking for a 5 year period or so, which has now been removed, but having heard from others about the problems faced after using 302's I was just after some detail.
Anyone else used or using 302's and been penalised after a length of time would be good to hear from.
...and not taken the 302 to mean what it is supposed to mean .. this page has temporarily moved.
Actually, Google handled 302's according to HTTP standard until recently. The standard for a 302 (undefined redirect), states that the user-agent should continue to request the page from the original location, not the new location.
This would mean the original page (URI) would be used in the results (correctly, because the status of the redirect has not been defined), but the content from the second page would have to be used for ranking purposes -- Some really 'cool' (used loosely) webmasters noticed this and started redirecting to other people's pages -- enter the 302 redirect problem...
The problem is:
Do you follow standards and request the page from the original location, using the content from the page being directed to? OR Do you discontinue using the standard and use the 'new' location in results, even though the page may move (or return to the original location) before you have the chance to re-index, because you do not know the status of the redirect?
It seems like it should be an easy question, but when you really start to think it through it gets a little tougher.
EG What if you index the new location, then the redirect is removed, now you have the page twice, which one do you include in the results? What do you do with the other one? What if you go with the easiest answer of 'index the new location', and rather than removing the redirect the webmaster changes the redirect to another page, do you remove the first page that was redirected to, or do you index both?
I could think of a number of ways to game most of the answers anyone could give to questions about redirect handling.
Apache have given you 302's for a reason and google doesnt seem to understand that.
But, what if the reason Apache gave the 302 status is because the person putting the redirect in did not define it as either permanent or temporary?
Any 'penalty' stemming from this would have absolutely everything to do with your fellow webmasters gaming the system, and the person implementing the redirects on your site making a mistake by not knowing the protocol and standards surrounding redirects. It's too bad really, because I am sure there are some good quality, deserving sites that are being missed in the results, but are not allowed due a few 'cool' webmasters who noticed a flaw, and site owner/manager oversites.
Justin
