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Hey everyone,

Hoping to get your take on this:

• We have some very high demand products, they usually sell out in minutes (lucky us, eh?!)
• We are implementing a queue function on a product page - basically if too many people try to check out at the same time, we dump them in a queue
• The queue could kick in before or after search engines have indexed the product page
• The product page has markup and on-page content relating to the product.
• The queue page exists on an external (yes, external) site
• The queue page will not have any of the product info, markup, or optimised page title
• Product page will 302 to queue page and starts a series of 302 redirects!

Here's the sequence when queue is active:

1. CANONICAL product page (with markup, on-page product info, optimised page title, etc.)
   >> 302 >>
2. queue page on external domain (ZERO markup, product info or page title)
   >>302>>
3. same queue page, but throwing a hashed queue ID into the URL (basically giving you your place in the queue)
   HELD IN QUEUE FOR A FEW MINUTES
   **>> 302> **
4. NON-CANONICAL product page (with markup, on-page product info, optimised page title, etc.)

I can foresee two scenarios

1. search engine has indexed product page prior to queue kicking in. Then queue kicks in 302ing search engine to queue page. because it's a 302 the crappy queue page content is indexed back to the originating product page. This causes search engines to drop the product page cos all the product-specific markup/content has been overwritten with crappy queue page content
2. search engines don't manage to index product page before queue kicks in. They crawl product page URL, get 302 to queue page, index crappy queue page content and think the product page is crappy, so don't traffic it. They will recrawl the product page once the queue's turned off, only to discover the product has sold out - boo.

I very much doubt the search engines will 'wait for a few minutes' so may never end up reaching the product page again.

I'm trying to get the markup/product info and optimised meta data injected into the queue page, so that remains present at all points on the journey in the hope that this enables search engines to continue to rank and traffic the product page.

What's your take on this?

Any suggestions on how we might overcome the issues? (before you ask; avoiding using the queue system is impossible, sorry!)

Thanks!