All pages going through 302 redirect - bad?

[dholowiski]

So, our web development company did something I don't agree with and I need a second opinion.

Most of our pages are statically cached (the CMS creates .html files), which is required because of our traffic volume. To get geotargeting to work, they've set up every page to 302 redirect to a geodetection script, and back to the geotargeted version of the page.

Eg: www.example.com/category 302 redirects to www.example.com/geodetect.hp?ip=ip_address. Then that page 302 redirects back to either www.example.com/category, or www.example.com/geo/category for the geo-targeted version.

**So all of our pages - thousands - go through a double 302 redirect. It's fairly invisible to the user, and 302 is more appropriate than 301 in this case, but it really worries me. I've done lots of research and can't find anything specifically saying this is bad, but I can't imagine Google being happy with this. **

Thoughts? Is this bad for SEO? Is there a better way (keeping in mind all of our files are statically generated)? Is this perfectly fine?

[jesse-landry]

it's only bad if you want those pages to get ranked and there are links (internal or external) pointing to the referring URLs.

In other words, 302 redirects do not pass link juice as a 301 does. Unless you are no-indexing these pages anyway, it's just not a good idea. If it were me I'd wonder why we were using 302s at all? I've only ever used one once and that was because I didn't want the blackhat-SEO links coming over to the new domain... But this is a different case.

[dholowiski]

This is what I've been struggling with. It's not a link-juice issue, and the page hasn't moved. We're just showing a slightly different version of the page based on where you are coming from. So even though www.example.com/category and www.example.com/geo/category both exist, www.example.com/category is the canonical URL and we don't want the /geo version indexed (because it's essentially duplicate content).

So from a technical perspective, it's essentially being used correctly. My concern is that when google suddenly sees thousands of pages double 302 redirecting, some kind of red flag will go up and we'll be penalized.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

If you can prevent the redirects then I would definitely choose for this option, I'm not a big fan of redirects because there will always be some damage in the authority that is passed on.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

I would think there has to be a better way to do that.  Sites detect IP addresses and deliver dynamically created local content all the time.  I would think there are some scripts out there which would do what you want without all the 302 redirects.  It would be cleaner and better SEO.  Unfortunately, I'm not a developer and don't have a specific suggestion, but I'm sure there's a better solution.