Thanks to Søren Sprogø from Afdeling18 we've been aware that
there might be a problem for correct Google indexing of certain
pages if you use the RSS Community Package.
According to Søren this is due to Google using the guid
attribute (ie. /26156) from the RSS to index
the Umbraco pages but it detects it as duplicate content if already
have indexed the content using the niceurl (ie.
/blog/2009/4/7/how-to-migrate-umbraco-40-to-iis-7-and-aspnet-35).
What's the best solution - 301 or 302
redirects?
The solution to this is to make Umbraco detect if there's an
incoming guid link (ie. yoursite.com/pageid) and then do a redirect
and I'll look at implementing this for 4.0.2 (with the option of
disabling it).
The big question is then - should it be a 301 redirect
(permanent) or a 302 redirect (temporary). In my logic it should be
a 302 as the whole point of a guid link is to ensure it won't
change (and the id won't change, but the nice url might if a page
title is changed). Søren argues that to fix the Google problem it
needs to be a 301, which would be very sad as the whole point of
ensuring links over time is then lost.
I've looked at how Wordpress handles this and it seems that
hosted blogs (on wordpress.com) uses 302 redirects, while many
Wordpress installs uses 301.
So calling all SEO/Google/RSS experts - what should we do?