Redirecting 301 or 302?

[HypermediaSystems]

Hi,

I think the part of this question has been already discussed, but not exactly the same, I think.

My site requires authentication for member page. When a user try to go to member area, we redirect to 3rd party to do the authentication.

1. user clicks a link to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html
2. www.myauthenticate.com/login?h=somehashuniquehash454859428778545 (enters id/pass)
3. login success => redirect back to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html

We are doing it 302, temporary redirect. But moz crawler error seems to suggest we should do it 301.
So my question is:
A. Should we do it 301???
B. If we do 301, what happens to myauthenticate.com? since it has hashtag, I am afraid it could create a lot of duplicate contents on myauthenticate.com side...

Thank you so much for your help in advance...

[DirkC]

I would make any link to a section that requires login of type nofollow, which according to Google is a acceptable reason to use "nofollow".  (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en). The pages behind the login are not accessible for searchengines so it makes no sense for the google bot to follow them. If the link is nofollow, you can use 302 or 301 as you prefer.

rgds,

Dirk

[Alick300]

Hi,

The page is about authentication for member page so I don't think it is important page as far as SEO is concern for this particular page. You can use either one it is up to you.

Second thing we don't want to index or rank such pages in Google because such pages doesn't useful for common visitors of your website in any way so you can also use noindex , nofollow.

Thanks

[MonicaOConnor]

Is the 302 redirect the only way to get users from one page to the other?

The difference between the 301 and 302 is that the 301 will remove the page from the index over time. The 302 redirect is more of a fork in the road allowing the other page to remain indexed. It should really be your decision, if you want the page to remain indexed then don't use a 301 redirect, keep the 302. If it is irrelevant or if there is duplicate content it might be better to use a 301 redirect.

[HypermediaSystems]

Hi,

Thank you for useful information, really helps!

I wish I could manually (I'm a designer and parttime webmaster on our site), but since the links are too many from too many places, and login page has nofollow norobot, I will recommend my boss 301...

Thanks again! : )