Employing Header:location Redirects And Link Equity

[chibineku]

I am reading a book called Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP and there are a lot of pages dedicated to various types of redirects and other status codes and how they affect your link equity. I have used header("Location: blah.php") several times in the creation of the site I'm working on and I want to know what impact this will have when spiders try to index the site. Would it be better to add meta tags hiding these pages from spiders, or put them in a robots.txt file, or is it ok? I am aware that I can send status headers at the same time, explaining the redirect, but none of them seem to fit with my intention. If you sign in, for example, the login script redirects you to a page that displays a confirmation message and then, after 2 seconds, you're redirected again. Is that a bad way of doing it with regard to indexing? I am developing the site on a spare domain, so I can play with my linking structures all I want until the site is properly launched on its own domain without worrying about boggling spiders or losing link equity.

[Ingolme]

Robots don't follow links provided by meta redirects (as far as I can remember).When sending a location header with PHP, the server is sending a 307 Temporary Redirect HTTP status, so the robot knows where to look for the next page.