302 (Temporary Redirect) up and growing, how to fix?

[tanlup]

Hi guys.

On my website I have an action that will only perform if you are logged into your account, otherwise you are redirected to the login page causing a 302 redirection.

When SEOmoz crawls my website, it gets all these redirections to the login page, but I really can't do much better so what is the best way of fixing this?

I've thought of using rel="nofollow", but I want make sure this change will fix my issue, both with the SEOmoz crawler and any other search engine crawler.

Thank you guys so much!

[wojkwasi]

Is it using response.redirect in .NET by any chance?

[tanlup]

Not really, my app is written in PHP and I'm doing a simple http redirect.

[THB]

I don't think there is anything you can really do to prevent this.  That's just the nature of the beast when it comes to pages that can only be seen by privileged users.

Typically, sites I've created, all the "member" pages are located within the own directory, ie. /my-account/, where I place a block on the folder within the robots.txt file so crawlers can't get their hands on privileged information.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Éber,

In my opinion, it's totally legitimate to nofollow those links to your login page, assuming they are showing the same 302 redirect and login page to Google. This will cut down on excessive crawling and possibly help you out with your Google Crawl "allowance."

If, on the other hand, you wanted to direct some link juice towards your login page, you could turn the 302 into a 301.

There might be other solutions, such as blocking the page with robots.txt, or using clever javascript. That said, nofollow is probably the easiest.