302 Redirect mystery? [Archive] - Search Engine Watch Forums

adamclark

08-04-2004, 06:31 AM

Hi,

I have had a problem client for a few months, well they are not the problem it is their site to be specific. It has been optimised fully, has lots of spiderable content with keywords weaved in, has a site map and it also has a few inbound links too.

I took a look at the new seotool site and ran a server checker against the domain and it gave me the following error:

Error 302 (META Refresh) - http://www.<clientsite>.com redirects to: https://:19638/webhost/rollout

The spider crawl gave:

Contents from Spider Page Read

Spider Input 1: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
Spider Input 2: <HTML>
Spider Input 3: 
Spider Input 4: <HEAD>
Spider Input 5: <TITLE>Refreshing to welcome page...</TITLE>
Spider Input 6:
Spider Input 7: <meta http-equiv="Refresh"
Spider Input 8: content="1; URL=https://:19638/webhost/rollout">
Spider Input 9: </HEAD>
Spider Input 10: <BODY
Spider Input 11: BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"
Spider Input 12: TEXT="#000000"
Spider Input 13: LINK="#0000FF"
Spider Input 14: VLINK="#000080"
Spider Input 15: ALINK="#FF0000"
Spider Input 16: >
Spider Input 17: </BODY>

It would appear that once the site is hit a 302 takes place to the web server (I'm note sure why).

I use the lynx browser to check what a spider can see and I have never come across this before, so I'm not sure if this is just some server processing for stats or if it may be causing me a problem.

Can someone give me some advice as to what this means and could it be causing the indexing problem as I am under the impression that 302s are not good.

Many Thanks

Adam Clark

Wail

08-04-2004, 11:15 AM

Er, I've not used the seotool - and can't, of course, check the client site myself.

I will say that 302 header response can't be a meta refresh. A meta refresh is on the client side (ie, it's part of a found webpage) whereas a 302 is a redirected webpage. You can't be both found and redirected.

You'd expect to see a header code of 200 from the server and then the meta refresh on the found page.

Perhaps the "302 error" isn't the same as a 302 header code (which isn't an error).

As long as you can visit www.example.com (used for your client site) and not be redirected then you're not being redirected - despite what the seotool might say.

Try using the Search Engine World server header checker at http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/servercheck.cgi