Trackback Redirects

[jeff_amm]

My wordpress blog/theme displays a Trackback URL link in the comments area of any page that has received a comment, eg http://guitarkitbuilder.com/build-your-own-clone-digital-echo-ping-pong-kit/#comment-2408

My crawl diagnostics report shows these links (basically domain.com/post-name/trackback) as Temporary Redirect warnings 302 with the stock advice "Using HTTP header refreshes, 302, 303 or 307 redirects will cause search engine crawlers to treat the redirect as temporary and not pass any link juice (ranking power). We highly recommend that you replace temporary redirects with 301 redirects."

Before I take more action on this I want to make sure this is a real problem.  My initial effort to fix it was to turn off trackbacks in the wordpress settings-discussion area and also on specific posts, but the Trackback URL link still shows for any post with a comment.

Any advice?

[TakeshiYoung]

That is a weird quirk of Wordpress. It's a poor design on their choice, but it does cost you a little bit of link juice since 302 redirects don't pass link value.

It's not a huge deal, but if you want to fix it you can update the code in wp-trackback.php. Just change the following line:

wp_redirect(get_permalink($tb_id));

to:

wp_redirect(get_permalink($tb_id),301);

That'll change the 302 redirect to a 301.

[jeff_amm]

Takeshi,

First, thanks, I made the change.  Other than waiting for my next Moz crawl to see if the warnings go away, how can I test that this works?

[jeff_amm]

OK never mind, I found a redirect checker and it says 301 so I guess that's good.  I still don't really get why it's useful to anyone to have this link in the comments area.