This has been a long term doubt to me. Can SE find the difference between a tracking url and a natural url? Here by tracking urls I mean the urls that redirect to another web page. As I think, in requesting side, there is no difference between SE spiders and normal surfers. When spiders find a link, they request the content of that page from the corresponding server and they get it. Can they figure out weather they were gone through a tracking url? Can spiders access tracking and all sorts of server side stuff which are restricted to the outside world? Recently MSN has indexed a tracking url of mine instead of the natural url of that page. It shows title, description etc as it is. This led me to think like this. Any thoughts please................. webgaya.
If the page has a 301 redirect the search engine will see the 301 header and redirect accordingly. If the page isn't using 301's then it is likely to be indexed.
Yep, I used to use a 301 redirect from the index page to a directory, and the directorie's home page got indexed, not the 301 redirected page.