Incorrect cached page indexing in Google while correct page indexes intermittently

[miway]

Hi,

we are a South African insurance company.

We have a page http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle which has a 301 redirect to http://www.miway.co.za/car-insurance.

Problem is that the former page is ranking in the index rather than the latter. The latter page does index occasionally in the same position, but rarely.

This is primarily for search phrases like "car insurance" and "car insurance quotes".

The ranking was knocked down the index with Penquin 2.0. It was not ranking at all but we have managed to recover to 12/13. This abnormally has only been occurring since the recovery.

The correct page does index for other search terms like "insurance for car".

Your help would be appreciated, thanks!

[MikeRoberts]

It would seem that http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle is actually doing a 302 (Temporary) redirect... which means its not passing any link equity. This could be the reason it is still showing in the index instead of your intended page. You would need to implement a 301 (Permanent) redirect to completely remove the old page in favor of the new one.

Edit: I double-checked it with a few more user-agents in SEOBook's HTTP Status Codes Checker and actually seem to be getting 301s sometimes and 302s other times. Not sure why it would be doing that but I would still double check that you have your redirects implemented correctly as that could be the culprit.