302 Redirect Pages in Google index :-O

[onetry]

I'm seeing 302 pages indexed in SERP ... but the strange thing is that the title and other elements aren't part of the 302 page and that page wasn't made to be indexed... but only to redirect URLs...

Bad thing I think...

[tedster]

Google's intended result for most cases is to index the 302 url but show the title and snippet of the destination page. Does this line up with what you're seeing?

Note, you can include a noindex meta tag on the 302 url.

[onetry]

Yes it is exactly the behavior I can see in this case.

I don't understand why Google doesn't index destination page instead of 302 ...

[tedster]

Because the 302 status means "Temporary". If you use a 301 "Permanent Redirect" then the target url gets indexed.

[Achernar]

Because the 302 status means "Temporary". If you use a 301 "Permanent Redirect" then the target url gets indexed.

Not anymore since a couple of weeks now.
For a site with 30000+ indexed pages, until september google was indexing the target page. Now this page has disappeared and has been replaced by the 301 redirecting to it. Not a problem in my case, but it could be for other sites.

[jimbeetle]

That's very unusual behaviour for Google, Achernar, and can have quite an impact. Have you used a server header checker to be absolutely sure that the redirects are actually returning a 301?

[g1smd]

Make sure that there isn't any sort of redirection chain having a negative effect here.

[Achernar]

That's very unusual behaviour for Google, Achernar, and can have quite an impact.

This is a new behavior. Up until somewhere in september, google was indexing the target page.

Have you used a server header checker to be absolutely sure that the redirects are actually returning a 301?

HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 14:58:11 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix)

And no redirection chain in place.

[edited by: Achernar at 3:02 pm (utc) on Oct. 14, 2007]