SEO - Problems possibly related to 301 Moved Permanently

Question

Right, here's the story:

We have had a website for one of our brands now for many years, the site design was very bad and recently did a complete overhaul, mostly design, but also some of the backend code.

The original site was using links such as this example.com/products/item/127 and thus I wanted to change them to be move user friendly, especially to include the product name, the same link now reads example.com/product/127/my-jucy-product/.

Since our switch over we have seen our Google results take a beating (we were on the first page for our normal search terms, now we're nearer the 4th!). The other problem we're having is that the links to the old products haven't updated to the new links despite me coding a 301 redirect from old to new. The 301 is not being fired from .htaccess, but in our PHP framework.

I had a look at how the site is being loaded from a old link that is still in Google and here's what firebug is reporting:

GET <google link>                             302 Found
GET example.com/products/item/127             302 Found
GET example.com/products/item/127             301 Moved Permanently
GET example.com/product/127/my-jucy-product/  302 Found

So the Google link has a 302, good. But when the old link comes in our framework is returning a 302! It's only afterwards when it finally hits the right part of the framework does it 301, so here's my question:

Is the reason our old links have not changed and our Google Ranking has significantly nose dived because Google is seeing a 302 before the 301?

At the time I was reluctant to mess with our .htaccess because it had become pretty complicated and I was under some pretty intense time constraints, now I'm wondering whether this was an incorrect disicion and perhaps I should revisit it.

Many thanks!

Edit

Bugger, just signed up to the Webmaster Tools and I'm getting redirect errors all over the place, hundreds of them! I think this is my problem.

Edit 2 So on closer inspection it looks as if it is because I was being lazy and not using .htaccess to redirect my URLs, I wanted to avoid doing this as it was easier at the time just to throw a PHP header, regardless I have now started convert our framework to depend more on the .htaccess, not only has this solved the problem (well, we'll see when I get a google crawl) but it has also improved the speed dramatically!

Answer 1

One thing to look at is canonical links (which is how SO does it). This means you don't need to do redirects, old links will still work and search engines will get updated accordingly.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Answer 2

I think noone except of google can answer your question with 100% confidence.

302 temporary redirect most probably prevents google to update the old link to new one and this situation COULD have effect on page ranks.

I'd first of make sure that all old pages are accessible and redirected immediately with 301.

Answer 3

There's no telling how Google will adjust its PageRank witch's brew on a day to day basis, but in general, you should expect to see a (temporary) drop in PR following a mass 301 redirect of legacy URLs. It often just takes a little time (a month, maybe two) for things to percolate.

Note this does not answer your question about whether the 302 is hurting you. Just pointing out that, even if it's not hurting you, you should still see a drop in PR temporarily, on the basis of the mass 301 redirect alone.