Link Juice passing through a redirect of a disallowed URL

[john4math]

Hey guys!

Suppose I disallow search bots from indexing anything on my secure server in my robots.txt, and 301 redirect all of my secure server traffic to my non-secure site.  Will the search bots see the redirect before they realize that they're disallowed from accessing that page?  Or will they see that page is disallowed and not follow the redirect?

Should I change my robots.txt to allow search bots to crawl my secure site so they can find the redirects?

[Nick_Ker]

If you think there are any links out there that point to your secure pages and want to preserve any SEO related value from those links, you should remove the disallow from robots.txt and use 301 redirects. However, if you redirect your secure pages to non-secure, what is the point of having the secure pages? They would never be used since users would be 301 redirected to the non-secure address.

If you are trying to keep the secure pages out of the index to avoid duplicate content, and want users to be able to have access to the secure pages, disallow in robots.txt and remove the 301 redirects.

In the case of pages that don't really need to be secure, but are available both as http and https, you could also use the canonical tag to show either the secure or non-secure as the original. Individually redirecting the potentially duplicate pages rather than a sitewide https to http redirect would preserve any "juice" you may be getting from links to either version.

If it is more complicated, take a look at this thread on Googles support forum: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a7fac6f81489bc2&hl=en

[john4math]

Thanks Nick!