Google is still bungling 301 redirects

Bizarre Handling of a 301 (http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1427)
Sept. 29, 2006
Rand at Seomoz.org

As some folks may have noticed, we 301'd web2.0awards.org over to www.seomoz.org/web2.0/. It was always our intention to do this once we'd given the Google sandbox a thorough test and, having seen that a lot of sexy inbounds, press coverage and search traffic can dodge the box, we figured it was time to put the content where it belonged.

Google is the only engine that appears to be recognizing the new URL quickly (the change was made at the beginning of the week), and a search for "web 2.0 awards" is referring searchers to the new URL.

...

However, we'd also been ranking for a good long time on the front page of Google for the more generic search - "web 2.0". Recently, we slipped onto page 2, but with the re-direct, we saw an incredibly odd result: the trailfire bookmark page to review the site has now replaced the awards themselves, which don't appear at all in the results. A few questions:

I don't see any links pointing to www.trailfire.com/kabees/marks/7676 (internal or external) - Yahoo! hasn't spidered it and MSN shows only 2 internal links. Why does Google believe this page do be important enough to rank so highly for the competitive search?
If Google's index recognizes the new URL for some queries, why is it showing duplicate content on a separate domain for a more high-volume query?
Is this a risk that others run with content that gets tagged at sites like Trailfire?
Note that a search for "SEOmoz" also brings up the Trailfire page in place of what used to be the awards site...
Has anyone seen this type of behavior in the past from Google (or other engines)?

I'd suspect that a lot of 301s could be badly misinterpreted if this bug isn't fixed.

Once more the G drops the ball.

Considering I have a couple 301's that redirect from /forum to root and forum.domain.net to www.domain.net I could be affected by this bug?

Following the Big Daddy update and its sequels, a number of problems became apparent, 301 redirects being one of them. It seems that Google has fixed some bugs only to create others. One of the things they were apparently trying to do is correct the issue where Google saw www.domain.com, domain.com, www.domain.com/, and domain/com/ as 4 different URLs. In the process, many people who had been trying to use 301 redirects to force all of those URLs to resolve to the same place seem to have been hit.

Since the original update, some of those issues seem to have been resolved. However, one thing that's important to do is to make sure that any 301 redirects are actually returning 301 in the headers, and not 302 or 200 or 404.

Thesre are several places you can check your page headers - here's one: http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp

Ah, nice tool, and yep, both redirects return 301 in the headers. Thanks for the link.

Okay, then you should be okay, or as okay as anyone is in Google these days.

I discovered (with the help of a DigitalPoint member) shortly after Big Daddy that some of mine were returning double headers - the first saying 301 and the second saying 200, meaning that effectively Google mignored the first and assumed it had found the page with the original URL.