I’ve got several issues related to internal 302 redirects and duplicate pages. Every page on the site has a “place an ad†link that contains parameters identifying the category and region the user is currently viewing. If the user is logged in and they click on the link they go directly to a their account page where they would place an ad. If they are not logged in I do an internal 302 redirect to the register/login page for the site. The problem comes from the SE crawlers. 1. They see 500k+ unique links that point to what appears to be the same page - i .e, a ton of duplicate pages. 2. I generate several thousand internal 302 redirects a day and from what little I’ve read about them and the SEs I’m concerned that I may be creating a problem for myself now or down the road. I was considering putting a ` rel=â€nofollow†` on the links to get the bots to stop trying to index the login/place an ad page. This solution would solve the issue in the future (I’m not sure how I can get the links out of the indexes though). But the real question is that by using ` rel=â€nofollow†` for these internal pages will I be telling the SEs that my site is irrelevant? BTW – I’m working on the code to insert meta tags NOINDEX / NOFOLLOW / NOCACHE on the login pages but it’s going to take several months to implement. The ` rel=â€nofollow†` is something that I can do in 5 minutes.
Why don't you just use the robots.txt file to block spiders from the page that's being duplicated? You would typically just place the pages you do not want to be indexed in a directory and block it with the robots.txt. You can also block individual files. I don't see where the rel="nofollow" attribute tells spider that a site or page is irrelevant. I think it simply tells them not to follow the link, similar to the way the robots meta tag works.
TE, The pages are generated dynamically i.e., “index.php?page=login?cid=3456&rid=1234†so I’m not sure if Disallow can work. This sentence from the google blog on comment spam is what has me concerned In this case I would be the site and the spammer which is the genesis of my question.