Advertising with a 302 Redirect

[pabloid]

Hi all!

I've been approached by a company that has asked to copy some content from my website in exchange for a link back to me.

While I instantly said it would have to be rewritten first I noticed that the link back they have previously used are all 302 redirects from an ASP script with a parameter like so:

redirect.asp?url=http://example.com

I've done a quick search in Google for site results on the ASP script and it seems that the redirect + parameter url is pulling in the title tag from the destination, so redirect.asp?url=http://example.com would have the same title tag as http://example.com

Does anyone have any experience or knowledge with this kind of link? I'm not able to see if it has negatively affected the guys who have already taken this offer but it seems like it can't be a good thing?

Would you guys stay away from this offer completely even if the content was rewritten?

[tedster]

I'm not quite following this. What page is being redirected? Is it the article (rewritten or not) on their site?

[goodroi]

It sounds like the other site wants to copy your content and in return is giving you a link that is 302 redirected to your site.

You will probably not have a problem. There is a chance you can have issues with duplicate content and/or 302 hijacking. I prefer to keep things simple and avoid those situations.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

eBay's affiliate program recently threatened to ban affiliates who didn't change all 302 links to 301's, it's apparently a big deal to some.

The issue of 301 vs 302 on links comes up when the site is using a redirect script so clicking the link actually results in two jumps, one to the redirect page and then on to the site. As far as value goes I am not sure there is ANY value in a redirected 302 link because the engine is led to believe the content belongs on site a and is only on site b temporarily. Only Google knows if pagerank is going to flow through that and some is lost in the extra jump anyway no doubt.

The important thing isn't pagerank, would you get any traffic from this link? If so... just do it.

note: 302 is the default browser code on a redirect unless 301 is specified, it's probably not done to intentionally rob you of value. You can ask them to modify their redirect page by adding something like...

Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );

above their jump which is probably something like...

Header("Location: example.com OR php parameters of some kind");

[pabloid]

Tedser, sorry for the confusion!

Goodroi that is exactly what is happening!

Thanks for the reply sgt! There will be traffic from the link and the traffic could potentially convert very well!

Am I right in saying that the link won't provide any other benefit than traffic unless I get them to link directly to my site?