Sudden jump in the number of 302 redirects on my Squarespace Site

[Jcoley]

My Squarespace site www.thephysiocompany.com has seen a sudden jump in 302 redirects in the past 30 days. Gone from 0-302 (ironically). They are not detectable using generic link redirect testing sites and Squarespace have not explanation.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

the 302's mostly appear to be PDF documents. Does this sound right to you? Has this only just come to your attention, or have you recently uploaded lots of documents?

For example:

http://www.thephysiocompany.com/s/Clinic-Info-Patricks-Quay-Spec.pdf -->  http://static1.squarespace.com/static/537b0649e4b0f6c6b6877a35/t/542be1d5e4b005bb34fa0cfb/1412162005901/Clinic+Info+-+Patricks+Quay-+Spec.pdf

-Andy

[Jcoley]

Hi Andy,

That seems to be how Squarespace deals with docs in general. The number of 302's rose from 50(roughly the number of PDF docs) to 302 from July 9ths crawl. For example there are PDFs on the following page:

http://www.thephysiocompany.com/injuries-and-conditions-treated

But it is still showing up as a 302.

Thanks,

Stephen

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Stephen,

What are you using to see 302 of them? I didn't get anything like that number when I looked. There is the off-site 302, but we're talking just a few.

-Andy

[Jcoley]

Hey Andy,

Thanks for looking into this. I'm seeing them on the Crawl Diagnostics (Screenshot here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cne9w4etmqmr8kb/screenshot-analytics.moz.com 2015-07-27 15-07-24.png?dl=0 )

Squarespace support have said the following:

Juan U.: Thank you for waiting Stephen! The 302 redirects seems to be referring to the multiple redirects to the same page. The URL mappings must be used to redirect any link to a deleted page to an existent page. We've checked all the possible redirects to /services/dry-needling, and we found all possible combination of a page URL (tags, + symbols, refererences). All these redirects to the same page can be read as temporary redirects (302). They're not from a deleted page, but from a possible page.

Stephen: Ok, so should we clean up our url mappings to prevent this from continuing to happen?

Juan U.: Yes, that would be a great way to prevent any issue when the site's being evaluated by Moz. You can check any dead link on the site, with Google Search Console, this tool will help you find them and fix them. If any external link is pointing to a deleted page, you can request Google to remove it from the search results.

---

Make sense to you?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It does make sense Stephen, but this bit bothers me:

The URL mappings must be used to redirect any link to a deleted page to an existent page.

If I am reading that correctly then are they saying that 404's can't exist, just 302's? You don't always want to direct someone to a page, especially if it isn't applicable. In many cases, a 404 would be the right thing to do if a page is just being removed.

Of course, if there is somewhere to redirect someone to, then you would do so with a 301 (permanent redirect) rather than a 302 (temporary redirect).

I don't really understand their system, so might be missing something in translation.

-Andy