302 redirect problem

[BobGW]

Hello,

Our premade cart has a place on it's category pages to redirect that category to another category.

We did this with about 50 categories.

In looking at our internetmarketingninja crawl report, these redirects are all 302 redirects and not 301. I believe they all use a rel="cononical" tag but I could be wrong.

I don't know that our cart will allow me to change them to 301 redirects.

My understanding is that these category pages (both the original and the one redirected to) will get crawled with a 302, but will we get penalyzed for anything that's on the original category that is against Google guidelines?

And do we need to worry about this?

Thanks!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

A = old category URL

B = new category URL

If you have a 302 from A -> B, no link authority will be passed. So if there are no direct links to B, they will have trouble ranking. You should only do a 302 if A has been penalized by Google and you don't want to pass the negative links onto B.

If A does not have bad links/penalty, you should do a 301 redirect to B.

[BobGW]

Hi Oleg,

Thanks for the informative reply. Yes, if we can do a 301 redirect, we will - but what if we cannot? Do I need to properly optimize for recent updates the old category URLs since they will be crawled? Do I have to worry about duplicate content between old and new? What is the best approach if a 302 is all that we have?