Rails app returning 302 redirects, is that bad?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Maybe a bit off-topic here, but I have a site "mysite.com" and an action that will take "mysite.com/keyword" and find the most appropriate page for that keyword. I did it as a way to handle old bookmarks that I can't control, but still provide content that's useful (instead of 404 error, for example).

Server returns the correct page with a 302 redirect.

I think this behavior would happen elsewhere in an application as well.

Any thoughts on the use of actions catching keywords to serve the right page, and the impact of the resulting 302 on SEO?

2

jiblethead wrote in post #999139:

Maybe a bit off-topic here, but I have a site "mysite.com" and an action that will take "mysite.com/keyword" and find the most appropriate page for that keyword. I did it as a way to handle old bookmarks that I can't control, but still provide content that's useful (instead of 404 error, for example).

Server returns the correct page with a 302 redirect.

I think this behavior would happen elsewhere in an application as well.

I'm pretty sure that anywhere redirect_to is used in it sends a 302 redirect by default. You can also specify other redirect status codes in the options.

Any thoughts on the use of actions catching keywords to serve the right page, and the impact of the resulting 302 on SEO?

I don't know the impact on SEO, however 302 - Found status codes are very common on the web so I would expect Google's engine to be smart enough to deal with them. I'm not the right person to ask though.