Avoid 302 redirects

[andrea]

Hello,

Checking my redirects I noticed that the link to the shopping cart redirects to some other CGI page. The method used is 302 (temporarily moved). Here are the details as reported by the link checking program

http://www.essentialsforentertaining.co ... ction=show

redirected to:

http://www.essentialsforentertaining.co ... 8.103.51.2

status code: 302 (object temporarily moved)


I spent a lot of time to optimize my pages for Google and I was very careful not to ever use the 302 redirects, since Google can interpret it as suspect.

Is there a way to use a 301 rather than a 302?

Thank you.

[websitewerx]

It shouldn't be a problem unless you want your shopping cart pages indexed by Google -- but I can't imagine why you would want this (no one wants to follow a link from a Google search directly to an empty shopping cart).

If you disallow your shopping cart directory (looks like /cgi-sys or /cgiwrap would do the trick) in your robots file, then the spiders won't even try to follow the links into the cart (and therefore will never know/care about the 302 redirect).

[andrea]

Thank you for the suggestion websitewerx,
I do have a robots.txt file banning the crawlers from the cgi-bin, but still in my site there are some 302 I did not put there and that I'd rather not have.
So I thought maybe it is not a big deal for the Shopsite technical people to change them in 301 or avoid the redirection altogether.

[loren_d_c]

302 redirects are the proper redirects for the shopping cart to use. 301 redirects mean that the useragent/client should forget about the original URL and only use the new URL in the future. This would not be desirable for the shopping cart, since it is the original URL that generally contains the information about the product that was added to the cart, etc.

The reason that Google doesn't like the 302 redirects is not because of the redirects themselves or legitimate uses of it like shopping carts, etc, it is because of domain spamming, basically since domains are cheap these days people will buy up domain names with their keywords in them and have them redirect via 302 to their website so that it will look like a whole bunch of different websites that have high keywork rankings for certain keywords. These sites don't use a 301 because that would tell Google to forget about the old domain name and only use the new one from now on.

So using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 redirect would be appropriate if you just wanted to make sure your site was always showing the URL of www.domain.com instead of just domain.com (or vice versa), but it doesn't necessarily apply to a dynamic application where the original URL has specific information that dictates what the new URL/page looks like.

[andrea]

Thank you loren_d_c,

The reason why Googlre does not like 302 is slightly different in my opinion. It is simply because you can easily build a page (or 100 pages)extremely optimized for one or more keywords/keyphrases that would score very high in SERPS (also, as you said on a keyword-rich domain bought just for that). The page would look horrible to a human eye, but that would not matter because the 302 would redirect the visitor towards a real product/service page of a legitimate website. If the redirection were made via 301, as you said, the search engine would forget the original page, and the spammer would lose all the benefits of high SERPS.

In any case if the 302 is the best redirect for your shopping cart program, and the redirection cannot be avoided, no big deal.

[websitewerx]

Again, if the parts of the site utilizing 302 redirects are excluded by the robots.txt file, then it is obvious to Google that it is not a spam attempt (as you are specifically instructing Google NOT to index those pages). I sincerely doubt there is any negative impact on a site due to a 302 redirect on a robot-excluded page.

Not all 302 redirects are bad; the ones meant to deceive the search engines are the ones that are penalized. This is a legitimate use of 302 and is not a problem for your rankings.