Probably a stupid question, but . . . .

When using .htaccess to do a mod_rewrite redirect for the sole purpose of turning a dynamic URL, such as--

/essays/Dewberry.html​

--into a static form, such as--

/common/essays.php?in=en&term=Dewberry​

--if an ordinary (that is, 302) redirect is used, will that cause problems with Google, as opposed to using a 301? (Assume the rewriting applies to a large fraction of the site's pages.)

If there are many such rewrites as 302s instead of 301s, am I in trouble?

It seems I should know this well, but the more I think about it, the less sure I get.

 

302s are getting people in trouble. Best to use 301s.

 

For the purpose stated [Dynamic to Static] I don't see that as a problem.

 

Must be a 301 or your not gonna be happy.

 

302's don't transfer backlinks or page rank.

 

The negative responses do sort of raise the question of "Whenever *would* one use a 302?"

 

See http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=9222&highlight=redirect

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=9256&highlight=redirect

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=8547&highlight=redirect

There's a better one around here somewhere: I'm looking for it. THese are the reasons why it's bad; but I cannot speak to why it would be good.

 

Again, for the purpose stated I can't see you getting "in trouble" with the search engines.

With that said, what was your initial reason for using a 302?

For anyone who thinks a 302 redirect for the purpose of rewrites causes "trouble" with the Search Engines can you elaborate?

 

It's why business.com got banned.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=302+redirects&btnG=Google+Search

 

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. It's my understanding that Business.com got banned for redirecting "Domains" not pages within the same domain.

 

I don't know the ramifications of using it internally. I do know personally; I'd
be skeered to use it....internally or externally.

But that's just the chicken in me.

 

The only reason I can think of off the top of my head for using a temporary (302) redirect would be if a page was under (re-)construction and you intended to have the original URL be reinstated. Otherwise, all redirects should be 301 permanent.

For the purpose you are describing, Owlcroft (and by the way your example is backwards), use a 301.

 

I don't touch the stuff either.

I was thinking that maybe Owlcroft has a reason for using the 302's.

 

Using .htaccess to do a mod_rewrite redirect for the sole purpose of turning a dynamic URL, such as--

/essays/Dewberry.html​

--into a static form, such as--

/common/essays.php?in=en&term=Dewberry​

--does not, to my sensibilities, seem a "permanent" redirect: one still wants the URL to be given, and linked to, in the unrewritten form.

As I would think it--which may not be as Google would, well, they never think, say "consider" it--the PR of any links to the unrewritten form would apply to that form, and likewise, any 302 would not affect the link as such. That is, Joe Blow would link to--

http://www.mywonderfulsite.com/essays/Dewberry.html​

and his link would add to the PR of that page, under that URL, and that URL would be--rather, should be--what Google and all search engines list and, correspondingly, associate with the actual content of the page one finally gets to by calling that URL. The 302 ought to be both invisible and irrelevant to a calling entity (browser or robot), a search engine's listings, and, for that matter, anything else whatever.

Is that so strange or wonderful? Ponder the White Knight's introduction to his ballad in Alice: there is a difference between a thing, what a thing is called, the name of a thing, and what the name of a thing is called. (If that fuddles you, think of it as the difference between a datum, the datum's symbolic name, the datum's address, and the datum's address' symbolic name.)

I repeat: in logic and sanity (which may both be irrelevant here, Google and other SEs being involved), a 302 ought to have zero consequence. I repeat: if the page is--

/hotstuff/mypage.html​

-- links to it go to it, PR for links to it are "attributed" to it, the content of it is as seen when it finally displays, its PR ought to be determined by those links and that content, and the 302 that alters it to /mypage.php?stuff=hotstuff should mean nothing to anybody.

What matters it if I do or do not intend "to have the original URL be reinstated"? Suppose I have a page for which I need, for a few days, to substitute a very different form. If I use a 302, then later remove it and "restore" the original page, how is that--to Google or anyone--different than if I had simply substituted the one page for the other with no change of URL? Rhetorical question: it obviously is no different at all in any functional way. So why should the 302 process introduce some bizarre SE behavior? If I had a plain html page located at--

/essays/Dewberry.html​

--and by ftp upload substituted for it the page located at--

/common/essays.php?in=en&term=Dewberry​

--whatever difference does that make to linkage? It's a different page, yes: but suppose the two pages were in fact identical as they reach a browser (or search engine)--something that PHP makes perfectly possible? What kind of shit-for-brains Google "engineer" considers that one case differs from the other?

A page's address is the link by which it ultimately--meaning without manual intervention--can be reached. The end.

Yeah, yeah: have a page at location #1 and a page at location #2, with #1 doing 1 302 to #2 is "duplicate content. Oh? There is no page at #1. You absolutely, positively cannot find a page there--you will always end up at #2.

So what do we suppose Google had in its whatever-it-has-where-most-people-have-a-mind when it decided to penalize 302s?

OK, a black hat could have several nominal page URLs each of which 302s to some one same final page URL. Yeah, and...? How does that differ from having physically the same page (that is, a file on a server) at each of those several locations? This is like the cops arresting people for "possessing the tools of burglary", by which doctrine every adult human in the world would be in jail for rape. If a 302 makes duplicating content easier, that is no reason for using it as an excuse for a penalty: punish duplicate content, not something that can, if abused, lead to duplicate content. If Google ran the whole world, we'd all die of thirst because water would be forbidden on the ground that you can use it to drown someone.

Pfui.

 

You still have those examples reversed: the first is a static URL, the second is a dynamic URL.

I think you have a misconception about the purpose and interpretation of redirection. They are there to tell the spiders and human visitors that the page has moved. The 301 says "moved and it will now reside at this address permanently". The 302 says "moved but it will be back at the old location soon". They are defined that way according to a standard so that spiders and humans know what is going on when they hit the old URL. It is a matter of definition, not opinion.

And by the way, this is neither a Google standard nor a recent standard.

 

So does this mean a 302 can be used for the appropriate reason without a "penalty" from Google?

 

The only SE that has trouble with redirects is Yahoo, as far as I know. I don't know of any legitimate use of redirects that would be penalized by Google or anyone else.

On the other hand, I don't think 302 (temporary) redirects are used very often. I would wonder whether the redirected page would receive any benefits of PR transfer -- note the word "wonder" there... I don't know the answer to this. It seems to me if I were a spider/search engine and came across "this page has been temporarily moved" I would probably not bother updating my indices since that instruction/message says it's only a temporary change.

 

First: yes, I had the labels reversed. Silly.

But as to The only SE that has trouble with redirects is Yahoo. . . , reports from the front suggest that Google--while it may not have "trouble" in the sense of being unable to handle them at all--is frowning severly on at least some 302 redirects, for such "reasons" of their own as they see not fit to share with the peonage.

That redirects are there to tell the spiders and human visitors that the page has moved. The 301 says "moved and it will now reside at this address permanently". The 302 says "moved but it will be back at the old location soon". They are defined that way according to a standard so that spiders and humans know what is going on when they hit the old URL. It is a matter of definition, not opinion, is an interesting proposition.

The "definition" is 302 Found, not 302 Moved Temporarily; it does not parallel 301 Moved Permanently. On 302, the W3C remarks: Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. Though the word "temporary" is used in the W3C discussion, there is no requirement, express or implied, that the new URL ever revert to the original.

Let us further recall Google's own "Guidelines":

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?' character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small.​

Very certainly, "not every search engine spider" [their writers need lessons in compound adjectives and the hyphenation thereof] means "at least some Google spiders": they would not have mentioned this at all if all their spiders in fact could deal with all dynamic URLs.

(Note also the weaselry in wording: "crawls dynamic pages", when the issue is nothing at all to do with the dynamicism of the pages, which cannot be told apart from static ones, but with the URLs of such pages, a simple mechanical issue that, by its own admission, G cannot quite handle just yet.)

So we know that Google does not like at least some flavors of dynamic URL. That leads inexorably to the conclusion that Google is telling the world that at least some dynamic URLs can and should be mapped to static URLs. But that, in turn--to my mind--absolutely, positively means a 302 rewrite: what point a 301 rewrite as compared to simply putting the raw dynamic URL up in the first place?

The yet further implication, still, I reckon, inescapable, is that if one uses 302 rewrites to make potentially robot-troublesome dynamic URLs into easily digested static ones, the 302-target page must, ah say (Senator Claghorn) must, be treated for all purposes, in all ways, by all entities, as exactly equivalent to the same page under the original URL with no redirection considered. If that is not always and ever the case with, for example Google--if ever, for any reason, they treat a dynamic URL made 302-static in any troubling or penalizing way--they are vile, lying wretches who have said "We urgently request that you do something we will penalize you for."

Now whether Google, or any SE, is actually applying penalties to sites or individual pages for the use of 302s is a matter open to discusson. But as reading about some (including on this very thread) suggests, it is at least a palpable possibility.

Moreover, even if there is no direct penalty applied to a page reached via a 302, is it--as some have suggested--true that backlinks or PR associated with the static URL are not applied to the actual page? If so--I do say "if"--that is in itself a dreadful penalty. And one that, by any sane logic whatever, should ever be applied.

Perhaps the longest-frame conclusion here is this: Is it not exceedingly silly that people who have to earn their bread and cheese at these matters have to put up with so very much FUD from these dunces? Just exactly what devastating harm would befall The Great And Powerful Goog did it came along and say, in print, something along the lines of "When we see a 302 redirect from an apparently static URL to a dynamic URL, we will always treat it thus-and-so"??

Their "our shit don't stink" arrogance can only lead to an eventual pratfall of major dimensions, possibly when some Congressperson looking for an issue realizes what a juicy target a major public institution making and breaking individuals and companies at utterly secret whim would be for a subcommittee investigation.

I can scarcely wait . . . .

 

Actually, what w3.org says (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html) is

but regardless of what w3.org says, the 302 has always been understood to be a temporary redirect, as long as I can remember.

I don't understand why you are determined to turn this issue into another opportunity for Google bashing. This is NOT a Google issue -- it's a definitional or standards issue. Google doesn't say anywhere that they won't follow 302 redirects or refresh redirects (used honestly and transparently) -- just that if you wish to inform search engines that a page has moved, the 301 permanent is the best/preferred method. And Google hasn't decreed anything aboput 301s or 302s. They're simply telling you and other webmasters in their Guideline for Webmasters the way it is -- not just for Google but for everyone else.

As for dynamic URLs, actually I'd say that Google does a better job of indexing those than most, at least until the new incarnations of Yahoo and MSN Search, both of which have clearly borrowed heavily from Google's example of what people want in a search engine.

 

. . . but regardless of what w3.org says, the 302 has always been understood to be a temporary redirect, as long as I can remember.

What, then, do you feel should be used when a dynamic URL is being made to look like a static one? A 301 seems utterly pointless: why not just use the bare dynamic URL to begin with? Yet such a rewrite is a redirect. So what code?

I don't understand why you are determined to turn this issue into another opportunity for Google bashing. This is NOT a Google issue -- it's a definitional or standards issue. Google doesn't say anywhere that they won't follow 302 redirects or refresh redirects (used honestly and transparently) -- just that if you wish to inform search engines that a page has moved, the 301 permanent is the best/preferred method.

It is not an "opportunity" for Google-bashing: it is a case where-- if things are as many say--Google (and I reckon all the rest) deserve bashing.

And Google hasn't decreed anything aboput 301s or 302s. They're simply telling you and other webmasters in their Guideline for Webmasters the way it is -- not just for Google but for everyone else.

Well, now, that's the crux, isn't it? I don't want to say that where there's smoke there's fire, because old saws can be broken saws. But there are, beyond any least doubt, lots and lots of webmasters who feel, for whatever reason, that using a 302 is inviting a disaster with Google.

My argument is not that Google sucks because it mishandles 302s. My argument is that if any SE mishandles routine dynamic-to-static 302 rewrites in any way whatever that harms the site so using them, then they deserve to strung up by the neck, or whatever convenient parts suggest themselves. It's a proposition: if...then.

As for dynamic URLs, actually I'd say that Google does a better job of indexing those than most, at least until the new incarnations of Yahoo and MSN Search, both of which have clearly borrowed heavily from Google's example of what people want in a search engine.

That may be, but it is quite beside the basic issue. Let me recast the point in distinct steps. Lookit:

1. Google itself says that "some search engine robots"--which must necessarily include at least some of its own--do not handle dynamic URLs very well.

2. It seems impossible to doubt that #1 carries a cast-iron implication that dynamic URLs are best recast as static ones.

3. Recasting a dynamic URL to look like a static one just about invariably involves a redirect. (The ForceType directive is rather draconic.)

4. A redirect means a redirect header. Using a 301 redirect header is clearly useless: that is no different from using the dynamic URL in the first place. If the robots trip over dynamic URLs, they will trip over the 301 one as soon as they make it "permanent" in whatever they use for memory.

5. A 302 redirect thus seems, by the logical progression of the stpes above, mandated--by google.

6. IF--big "if"--Google is in any way penalizing any site for using a 302, they are stupendously hypocritical. The end.

Concerns, of various sorts, about how Google handles 302s and other redirects are not far to seek: do a--dare I say it?--Google on <Google 302> and spend a little while. In short, as one apparent expert put it,
"Google has a problem with handling 302 redirects, period."

But the cold hard truth is that he is wrong. Google has no problem at all. You and I have the problem.