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Is 302 Redirect used by WSN Links?
A site owner sent me an angry letter saying that 302 Redirect is messing up their site's search engine ranking with MSN and Google.
Apparently, the WSNLinks that I am using at http://www.abccrafts.com/links/index.php uses this technology. I explained to this person that he himself exchanged reciprocal links with us using the submission form. He then apologized for his harsh email and explained what 302 is about. To avoid any problems, I replaced link.php?id=1894 to {LINKURL} because his issue is that the tracking masks his actual url. I am posting his message about 302 below. Please let me know if this is true.
Thanks,
Josefina
>>>
Please accept my apology for the tone of my earlier email. Let me explain what is going on. The program you are using to track your links uses a mechanism called a 302 redirect. If you are interested in understanding how it works, please read on. If you are not interested, then please do remove our link, and please let me know when its removed.
So now for the explanation. In HTTP technical terms, a 302 redirect is a type of redirect that means "Object Temporarily Moved" (as opposed to a 301 redirect which means "Object Permanently Moved"). These are simply normal HTTP commands, and a 302 redirect is an effective means to allow your site to track clicks to the sites that you link to. Unfortunately, there is a bug in Google and MSN's indexing algorithms that causes them to treat the 302 redirect improperly. The original design of the 303 redirect was not for tracking click throughs, but to allow the owner of a site to account for changes in their site architecture.
So Google and MSN see a 302 redirect as being the action of someone who owns both pages involved. Further, they treat the content of the page being linked to as being the content page being linked FROM, and they treat the page being linked to as a non-page. Your link program is linking to us through a page at: www.abccrafts.com/links/link.php?id=163 (this is how it counts the clicks) and Google has found this page, and is now treating it as the page where our content resides. Hence Google thinks that this is now the page where the content for our Online Schools page resides, not on our site.
In addition, Google sees the same content on our site when they crawl it directly (and not through your redirect). So they think we are trying to SPAM them. The end result is that all our Google listings have dissappeared. There are a lot of malicious search engine spammers out there that are using this technique to bring down their competition. We have been attacked in this way for real, and I do apologize for treating you as one of those people.
But please do remove our link, and let me know. You may want to consider another strategy for managing your links, as other people may become aware of this as well. |
