Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
This is for a well established site that ranks well on the other engines without issues. We do a number of internal redirects within our own site, mostly during the checkout process. Only to redirect to other internal pages to make sure that the customers have the proper info and following the process.
I ran this header check with a header checking tool to spot redirects and hope i found a problem.
1. Requesting: [example.com...]
GET /page.asp?cust=1 HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: www.example.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0)Server Response: 302 Object moved<<<Today modified this to 301 Permanent>>>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:26:59 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Location: [example.com...]
Content-Length: 196
Content-Type: text/html
Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDAQCAADSA=FADEOBCBHEGGDGHFALMHOGKC; path=/
Cache-control: privateRedirecting to [example.com...]
2. Requesting: [example.com...]
GET /NEWPAGE.asp?cust=1 HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: www.example.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0)Server Response: 200 OK
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:26:59 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Pragma: no-store
Content-Length: 36325
Content-Type: text/html
Expires: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:25:59 GMT
Cache-control: no-store
Just today i have changed the 302 redirect to 301 redirect to hopefully solve the problem. I tried to show this change above. Do you think may have been an issue with our site? I think i may have been getting many different penalties because most pages had at least 1 internal 302 redirect.
Any help or thoughts on issue?
[edited by: tedster at 7:40 pm (utc) on Feb. 13, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]
Can't help but notice that the urls here are all using the https protocol - is that common on your site, or do you have a canonical problem with https and http, as discussed here: [webmasterworld.com...] ?
If urls can be accessed with both protocols, that is another kind of duplicate url and may also be hurting your site. Combined with the 302, that alone creates 4 different urls for each bit of content. If you've got a "with-www" and "no-www" issue, it becomes 8 url variations. That could really start to pile up the problems.
Most all of our webpages have a link pointing to a page that had a 302 redirect. This was done to ensure that we were having a checkout on https as opposed to http.
Also, in many other cases we linked to a page that added stuff to a database, then 302'd it on to the next page for the customer to add more stuff.
We have blocked most of these pages with robots.txt. But even though the page is within the robots.txt I'm seeing big problems with SEO.
ROBOTS.TXT is blocking.
User-agent: *
/page.asp
/NEWPAGE.asp
do we also need to add something like:
Disallow: /page.asp?*
for those pages that have variables passed to them? Google does not seem to be indexing any of these pages, in either case.
I don't think we have canonical issues as none of our https pages are in the index. With did have this problem years ago, but have since cleaned it up....I think.
http://www.example.com/PAGE.asp
http://www.example.com/pAGE.asp
http://www.example.com/PAgE.asp
http://www.example.com/PAge.asp
http://www.example.com/PaGE.asp
and on and on forever. It is a bad problem with Windows...Linux does not do that. A Windows server is an SEO nightmare to say the least. Good luck!
Also you wouldn't use this: Disallow: /page.asp?* to block the ?, you would use: Disallow: /*?
That stops ALL URLs with a ? in them from being indexed...ONLY Yahoo and Google support it though.
[edited by: WiseWebDude at 10:45 pm (utc) on Feb. 13, 2008]
1.) Add customer IDs.
2.) Ensure that customers are on SSL pages.
3.) Save stuff to the DB and then pass on customer to checkout.
IMPORTANT question...
Does the 301 pass on the SEO value of the current page to the landing page?
Can Page1 still rank well in the SERPs?
An internal 302 will cause the original url to be indexed, but the content will be that of the destination url.
Now that I've got a better understanding of your situation, this does NOT seem like a good place to use a 301. If you are adding customer IDs to your urls, you should definitely find anther way of dealing with this whole area - such as cookies and sessions id information. Otherwise you can create a mass of duplicate urls.
I care about a couple of things.
1.) Avoiding penalty
2.) Keeping Page1(Good content) with SEO juice. Because Page1 is linking to a bounce page that does some stuff then moves on to another internal page. This bounce page was doing an internal 302.
I want to clarify if linking to a bounce page, will hurt the page linking to it. So, if I link to a bounce page that is doing a 302 redirect, will the original page be dinged? I don't care about the bounce page ranking, just the original page.
Also, these are all internal pages, and bouncing to internal pages. Never to external.
Thanks again for you valuable help!
