Redirecting the web pages to a targeting location is a good thing only if it is necessary and should be meaningful. For example, sometimes we need to do so because to fix the duplication issues among the various pages in website. But this is not the case for everything, before redirecting any web page we make sure it is correct and point to the final destination. Some webmasters doing unnecessary redirection in order to bring their website in top of the search engines, a kind of black hat technique in search engine point of view which against the search engine guidelines. They don’t aware about those things will create harmful effects in future.
I received a warning message today for the XML Sitemap in google webmaster tools, after a deep analysis I came to know that some unnecessary redirection has performed for particular web page in the website. I have put the warning message below where I received from Google webmaster tools for your reference,
Warning message from Google Webmaster Tools:
HTTP Error: 302 URL Not Followed
URL: http://www.xyz.com/videos/watch/184-abcd_efg_01.html is redirected to http://www.xyz.com/videos.html
When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL.
As we all know that XML sitemap is included to make the website pages indexed in search engines to crawl fast. But if such kind of redirection loss the search engine rankings and even traffic too.
The only solution is either remove the following snippet in xml sitemap or execute the corresponding video page instead of redirecting to videos.html page.
<url>
<loc>http://www.xyz.com/videos/watch/184-abcd_efg_01.html</loc>
</url>
If any of the webmaster have come across such issue previously or have any idea, solution to resolve this issue, please share it in the comments section.
Tags: 302 error, duplication issue, http error, redirection error, unnecessary redirection, URL final destination, URL redirection, URL targeting location
This entry was posted on Friday, January 28th, 2011 at 3:30 am and is filed under Google, Internet Updates, Search Engines, SEO & SEM News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
