A WebmasterWorld thread has reports that Google is confusing 301 redirects as 302 redirects. This can be a serious issue, because 301s are the type of redirects SEOs and webmasters use to properly pass link juice and page factors from an old URL to a new.
If Google considers these 301s as 302s, temporary redirects, it can cause pretty large issues with passing link value from one URL to another. At the same time, there can be sticky issues that may lead to hijacking URLs and so on in the Google search results, when using 302 redirects. So this can lead to some serious issues, from what I understand.
A senior member in the forum said:
I have set such a redirect over a year ago, and still several thousand of the redirected URLs show in the SERPs.There's something broken in their system.
This morning I also saw Dave Naylor write on Twitter:
@neyne have your seen all the 301 fuck ups at the moment ..
Dave Naylor
DaveNaylor
@rustybrick check out Dave's tweet with SERP
Branko Rihtman
neyne
@rustybrick @neyne I'm seeing 301 redirects ranking in google along with target sites like http://bro.gs/hfpz seeing more pop everydayDave Naylor
DaveNaylor
Are you noticing this as well?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
