Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Long story short: I have a 9 y.o. site that's been plagued with loss of ranks since 15 months ago, then -30 penalty 7 months ago and have now succumbed to the recent PR update - got from PR5 to PR4 couple months ago and now PR0. Coincidentally, Google shows zero backlinks to it with link: operator (oddly, still shows 18,000+ in WMT)
Anyways, done with background info, back to the subject matter. In trying to figure out what happened I've discovered that one of the major authority sites in the industry links to my site not directly but via a redirect script (to count clicks, I assume - no malicious intent). This script then 302 forwards to my homepage.
Additionaly, quite a few minor sites link to me in the same manner.
What the consensus of this group has been lately - can my site's ranking be damaged by 302 redirects to my hompage, especially from authority sites?
The way Google indexed these redirects, you'd very often get a url from the domain originating the link... usually a long and ugly cgi url... appearing with the title and snippet of your page, which received the link. In some cases, the url from the redirecting site might end up being clustered with the result from your site.
Depending on the ranking of the redirecting site for a given search, you could actually end up ranking higher, but surfers might not know the page was yours.
Google has apparently fixed this problem, and I no longer worry about it (much). It's not ranking that was hurt, though... it was listing appearance and apparent ownership of the page in the serps.
