High Temporary Redirects: Login required pages

[Bio-RadAbs]

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?

[Bio-RadAbs]

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

[donford]

Hi Cyto,

Do you have the parameter blocked using robots.txt?

user-agent: *
disallow: /*returnto

That would seem like the easiest fix to me