Google penalising 302 rewrites?

jwt

Came across this on another webmaster site

After over a year of pleading by webmasters about "302 hijacking', Google responded in nearly the dumbest way imaginable, and is by simply penalizing all 302 redirects in place for more than a day or two, period the end, no matter if they are to within the same domain or not.

It thus becomes an urgent necessity that all users of the plain [L] redirects at once modify the related lines in their .htaccess file so that the flags code on the Rewrites is changed from--

[L]

--to--

[L,R=301]


That will convert the former 302 rewrite of the many URLs from dynamic forms to static forms from a 302 to a 301.

Anyone know if its true?



John

mneylon

It would seem so. We had some very "interesting" issues after we redid our website

FreeHost

I was under the impression that a site was only penalised when the hijacker posted duplicated content in place of the redirect after he gained PR from the hijacked site. But Google are very secretive about their policies, and saying that, it’s probably is true. They had to respond to Page Hijacking in some form or other, especially for sites whose income is related to their search engine position. I read an interesting analogy on this;

“if you find two children fighting, you never really try to find out who is to blame or who started it, you just send both of them to bed”

The above could be draconian for the innocent party, but I’m sure an email to Google would sort it out.

Most (99.9%) people use redirects for perfectly legitimate purposes, if you have a lot of pages/site changing all your redirects and Meta refresh pages to permanent redirects could be a bit of a nightmare, but is there another solution.

mneylon

The best thing to do is frequent the boards where Google staff actually hangout

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

dahamsta

daveirl wrote:

This post has been deleted.

Yes. You can also use one of the following:

Redirect permanent /page.html [url="http://mysite.com/page2.html"]http://mysite.com/page2.html[/url]
RedirectPermanent /page.html [url="http://mysite.com/page2.html"]http://mysite.com/page2.html[/url]

Is a redirect without the 301 a 302 redirect?

Yes, 302 is the default, see the documentation here.

How do I get Google to notice my changes, try and submit page.html to Google?

I'd just wait until Google comes back meself.

adam

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

mneylon

Google should pick up the changes fairly quickly, though it may not update the SERPS immediately

impr0v

Apologies for my ignorance but could someone translate the above, because I don't really know what you are talking about? Is it that the Google ranking system will not now take account of links to your page which are just blank pages with a redirect, because these redirects were put in place simply to increase a site's ranking?

What's the difference between a '301' and a '302' and why can't the individuals trying to fool the system simply use the new ones?

I have an old site location redirecting to a new one with a response.redirect asp statement, does what you are discussing mean anything to me?

EDIT: After reading dahamasta's link I now see it refers to ways of configuring apache, and my redirect should therefore be unaffected.

dahamsta

impr0v wrote:

Is it that the Google ranking system will not now take account of links to your page which are just blank pages with a redirect, because these redirects were put in place simply to increase a site's ranking?

This has always be an issue with search engines. Where possible, it's best to avoid any kind of redirection. Even, and possibly particularly, META redirects.

What's the difference between a '301' and a '302'

They're status codes that a webserver - any webserver, it's a standard - sends in the headers of a response as information that clients (browsers) can use to act upon, or not as the case may be. In this particular case, they tell the client that the resource the user is looking for has moved to another location -- 302 represents a temporary redirect, and 301 represents a permanent one.

If they so chose, a client could use the information from a 301 header to redirect the user to the new location, and update the user's bookmarks with the new URL automatically at the same time. For some reason, this has yet to be implemented in mainstream browsers.

Other examples of status codes are the 2XX series, such as a 200 response, which denotes that everything is A-OK, and here's the resource you were looking for kind sir; and the 4XX and 5XX series, which represent errors, such as the infamous 404 Not Found.

and why can't the individuals trying to fool the system simply use the new ones?

They can; they will; they do.

I have an old site location redirecting to a new one with a response.redirect asp statement, does what you are discussing mean anything to me?

Yes.

EDIT: After reading dahamasta's link I now see it refers to ways of configuring apache, and my redirect should therefore be unaffected.

Sorry, but no. IIS has to send status codes just like ever other webserver, otherwise the web wouldn't work. And that's what your ASP code is telling it to do. From a quick Google, it looks like Response.Redirect sends a 302 status, so you do in fact need to update your code. Since I don't want to tarnish my permanent record on Google with any more ASP searches, I'm afraid you'll need to figure out the rest yourself.

HTH

impr0v

Heh, thanks for explaination anyway.

impr0v

If anyone else is interested, the following would seem to be an appropriate asp replacement for my simple response.redirect:

<%
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
dim strNew
strNew = "[insert new URL here]"
Call Response.AddHeader("Location", strNew)
Call Response.Write("<html><head><title>Object moved</title></head>")
Call Response.Write("<body><h1>Object Moved</h1>")
Call Response.Write("This object may be found at <a href=""" _
& strNew & """>" & strNew & "</a>.")
Call Response.Write("</body></html>")
Call Response.End 
%>

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