High Temporary Redirects: Login required pages
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Noticed something interesting, a high temporary redirect report from Moz. Reviewing the pages they are caused by the user having to login and getting redirected.
I can see the returnto query in the URL too. My thoughts:
- Since a login is required and the user is being redirected, these should remain 302 and not 301.
- I tested my Google Analytics account to **Exclude URL Query Parameter **returnto, just to see if it affected traffic. It didn't, I mean I don't see urls duplicated with the parameter anymore, just grouped together, so traffic is still being counted.
I'm going to wait 1 more day and see what impact the GA traffic is before applying the exclusion to my true Google Analytics profile.
This got me thinking, I should probably exclude this parameter from Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, that way Google/bing won't read those urls.
Now does Moz's crawler follow that? Do you think that would change my moz crawl diagnostic report because I told Google/Bing crawlers to exclude that parameter.
What do you think of my approach to reduce these high temporary redirects reported by Moz? Will it work? Has it plagued you?
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It isn't defined in robots.txt, just google webmaster tools, bing, and Google Analytic settings.
I guess mentioning it in the robots.txt should allow ANY bot to ignore it.
Thanks Don
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Hi Cyto,
Do you have the parameter blocked using robots.txt?
user-agent: * disallow: /*returnto That would seem like the easiest fix to me
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