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What to do with 302 redirects being indexed
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Hi there,
Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor.
For example:
http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/
In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL;
en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/ (there is no content here, and never has been). This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL:
http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b
The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links.
Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting. Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable. But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index?
Is the canonical tag the best way? I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right?
Thanks for your help!
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Pleasure.
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That's helpful, I will do that. Thanks Marcus!
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Hey,
Adding /co/ to your robots.txt will sort this out long term and you can remove these pages (or at least hasten the removal of them) in Google Webmaster Tools.
I have seen this approach before where a 302 page is used as a proxy to do some processing and then forwards on to something else. Not ideal from a Search perspective as this is a temporary redirect being used in a permanent situation.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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