Getting duplicate "Title tag" in GWT with 302 redirects

[gabidi]

Hi,

Prelude:


I have a site that's been around for 7+ Years and offers services for widgets.
The services offered are time sensitive and a certain service can be available this month, but gone the next.

There also might be more than one way you can service a widget and therefore for every widget we have a "widget service list" page that displays , and links to, the different ways a particular widget can be serviced. This works fine with users and google.

At times however a certain widget may only have one service method available to it, and to spare our users an extra "useless" page view any request made to that "widget's service list" is automatically redirected (302) to the "service's actual page"


Predicament:

Users love the above , Google on the other hand is having issues...
Google webmaster shows the
"widget service list page" and the "actual service page" being redirected to as "Duplicate title tags" and "Duplicate meta descriptions" , essentially duplicate content.

Question to pose:

1. Is this issue due to the 302 redirect and not 301 ?
   
   
2. If the above redirect is changed to 301, in the future if a widget gets more than one method to be serviced and thus we would want it's "Service list" to be indexed, will that page be crawled when the redirect is removed , since 301 is permanent in a bots eye.
   
   
3. Should we change the redirect to a java script header one since it's meant to be more a user oriented measure than anything else ? This way the user gets the proper redirect and bots just see the page normally. Naturally the question of bad seo karma is implied here.
   

Notes:
-We've recently redesigned our site and quite a bit of changes on the infrastructure of navigation.
-Both the service list page and actual service page are in XML sitemaps

Apologizing for the lengthy post and thanking you for your precious time,
G

[rainborick]

I think you're probably just fine as things stand. You're using a temporary redirect in a way that seems appropriate for you. The WMT report on duplicate title and description is only reporting what Google has seen, and I don't think there's any great reason to worry about it in this instance. It is certainly due to the 302 redirect, since that leaves the original URL in the index and apparently Google assigns the content of the target/destination URL to the original. A 301 redirect could easily have some unintended consequences when the time comes to change the target/destination URL again.

Someone with more brain cells firing that I can muster on a Sunday morning may know of a reason to change your methods, but I think you're OK.

[g1smd]

I'm not sure how I would tackle this, but I think I would do away with the redirect and instead either:
- serve the 'lower level' page content at the 'higher level' URL (but this would mean that when multiple options become available, the content at the higher level will have to move to a new URL at the lower level, but at least the higher level URL will already be directly indexed and ranking), or
- put the content on the lower level page and link directly to the 'lower level' page URL from waaay above, i.e. have no 'higher level' page at all when there's only one lower page (with no 'higher level' page previously existing, it might take slightly longer for a new 'high level' page to be indexed once the product grows multiple options and the 'high level' page pops into existence to link to them all. Big advantages are: the first lower level page will already be indexed at the right URL and ranking for the content already on it, and the higher level URL would have previously been 404 {and with nothing linking to it}, not a redirect.)

I am undecided, but the latter appeals more - simply because pages come and go (200 or 404), and the interlinking between them changes, rather than URLs changing from being redirects to returning content.

Yes, in an ideal world the 302 should work exactly as you want, to solve this, but I'd not want to take too many chances; 302 support is, err, patchy.

[tedster]

A couple comments:

1. I would not use a 301 redirect in a temporary manner. That's likely to introduce long indexing and ranking delays when you change it in the future.

2. JavaScript is also a doubtful resolution because these days Google IS indexing a lot of JavaScript.

3. If the only issues are the WMT report of duplicate titles and descriptions, I think you can safely ignore that and change nothing. That makes sense to me, especially because your users are happy with the way things are. Remember - there is no duplicate content "penalty".