NYCPHP Meetup

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Mitch Pirtle mitch.pirtle-at-gmail.com |nyphp mambo list 022005| wrote:

>Hey gang,
>
>Would like your thoughts on this issue of Mambo and redirects. I know
>some of us are quite particular about how redirects are handled, and
>hope to get all of your opinions.
>
>http://mamboforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=5952&group_id=5&atid=101
>
>Does it matter to you (the community) whether we do a 302 or 301 redirect?
>  
>
Hi Mitch.

There is little doubt these days that the use of 302 has opened a 
loophole for whackers to knock you down in the search results, by 
exploiting the way Google assigns pagerank. If your site has certain 
other sub-optimal properties, 302'ing to it can cause it to drop out of 
search results (and maybe transferring your earned pagerank to the 
whacker's page). So a system like Mambo that 302's could be contributing 
to the success of these whackers. Strike one for 302 redirects.

It used to be that the 302 redirect was used to redirect a spammy 
keyword stuffed page about X to a separate, unrelated page about Y. That 
was a standard way to get tons of (untargeted) traffic to page about Y, 
based on the popularity of searches for page X (back in the days of 
pay-per-impression of banner ads, for example). Because of that "black 
hat" history, the search engines coded some cautions into their algos if 
they encountered 302's. They did not want pages throwing 302's to rank 
well, if they were just traffic hoarding redirects. No one knows how 
careful they are about 302's, but most of us have seen how multiple 
pages or subdomains set to 302 to a primary page on the same domain can 
get the primary knocked out of the rankings. Strike two for 302s.

By the way the 302 hijack consequence took on major importance a few 
weeks ago with the latest Google update showing lots of 
sub-optimally-configured domains demoted *if* they were subjected to 302 
"attacks" (intentional or not). For example, blog hosts that aliased the 
document root without using a 301 left their blogs vulnerable. Many of 
those blogs tanked as people 302'd to the various aliases for their 
docroot, and Google saw them as duplicates *with* 302 redirect fishiness.

-=john andrews
http://www.seo-fun.com