Should you cache redirects?

[Bio-RadAbs]

I would like to know what fellow SEO people think, should you cache a redirect?

Problems I see with caching redirects are meta refreshes and there might be a slow down in page load, but is it a big issue? Should we cache redirects?

Do pages get indexed more if you cache redirects? Our ecommerce product pages are all dynamic, and currently we cache redirects but i'm seeing a lot of meta refresh issues.

Another area that cropped up is that, the redirect doesn't pass on query parameters. Our system dumps URLs and they are redirected to SEO ones, but the redirect doesn't pass on parameters like Google Analytic tracking tags.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Sorry for the late response, but I can sum up my answer in a brief way.

I agree with you. If SEOmoz is finding the meta refresh, it's likely Google is too. And why the meta refresh? Why not a 301 redirect?

Could you provide an example of one of your search pages? Feel free to private message me if you don't want to share publicly.

[Bio-RadAbs]

Hi Cyrus,

Here's some more information. Hopefully it will help. All of our product pages are generated using a program. Users enter data into specific fields and gets saved.

Once the publish button is pushed of the program, the data goes to our developers. This isn't live on the web yet as it is just data. The information is dumped into a folder and our developers generate SEO urls and start populating templates with data.

This is what gets published live and indexed.

If I wanted to change the SEO URL. I simply need to specify which fields to generate the new URL from and get the existing URL to redirect to the new one. I can secure a single jump this way and crawlers will never jump from one link to another.

Google just sees this SEO URL and template page.

The problem is that, for efficiency purposes, the website's internal search doesn't use the SEO url, it instead generates a url based on the folder that gets data dumped in. Once a user clicks on this URL, they get redirected to the SEO page. Developers did this for "efficiency reasons"

This is where meta refresh is kicking in. Anyone who clicks on a product from a search gets redirects to the SEO one. SEOMoz is reporting a high meta refresh issue, but my developers are saying it's no problem as the search pages never get indexed.

In my opinion, even though the page isn't getting indexed, the spider is still following and noticing the meta refresh.

After pursuing, they said they can turn off from caching redirects. I'm not well versed in the implications of turning off the caching of redirects. Thus my curious question

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Cyto,

I'm no expert here, (and I might ask a few other SEO types with more expertise to jump in) but I'm curious - What do search engines see with these redirects?

For example, if I try to access page /example.html?q=1&tw=89, what does Google see in terms of redirects, response codes and URLs.

Also, could you provide a little more background on the meta refresh issue? Do the redirects pass through a meta refresh, and again what is the crawl path for search engines?

Thanks for your patience!

Cyrus