Is this a correct use of 302 redirects?

[GabrieleToninelli]

Hi all, here is the situation.

A website I'm working on has a small percentage of almost empty pages. Those pages are filled "dynamically" and could have new content in the future, so, instead of 404ing them, we automatically noindex them when they're empty and remove the noindex once they have content again.

The problem is that, due to technical issues we can't solve at the moment, some internal links (and URLs listed in sitemaps) to almost empty pages remain live also when pages are noindexed.

In order not to waste Google crawler's time, sending it to noindexed pages through those links, someone suggested us to redirect those pages to our homepage with a 302 (not a 301 since they could become indexable again, so it can't be a permanent redirect). We did that, but after some weeks Search Console reported an increase in soft 404s: we checked it and it is 100% related to the 302 implementation.

The questions are: is this a correct use of 302 redirects? Is there a better solution we haven't thought about? Maybe is it better to remove 302s and go back to the past situation, since linking to noindexed pages isn't such a big problem?

Thank you so much!

[LoganRay]

Hi,

That is a good use-case for using 302 redirects. I don't quite understand how it's causing soft 404 errors though. If you're redirecting pages to a 200 URL, then there shouldn't be any cause for soft 404. Sounds like there's something else in the mix contributing to these soft 404s.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

How about adding a rel="nofollow" to the links. Somewhat unnecessary but would send a signal that you don't want them to be called.

Unless there are thousands of these pages I really would not worry about this too much - not to say it is 100% ideal but there are likely better uses of your time with regards to improving overall traffic etc.

A more ideal solution would be to have some level of content on these pages at all times. So hard to advise here without any context but as an example we have a teaching agency that lists jobs. Often jobs in a given area are filled so are generally removed (Secondary Maths teacher in Birmingham). But by marking these roles as filled we can keep these pages with some relevant content, have some active lead generation to drive the email list (new jobs added daily) and add some urgency when there are live jobs on there. Just a better solution all round and it means we don't end up with fluctuating thin content pages.

Hope that helps! 
Marcus