Can Google index page that is login-required and redirects to Login page?

Question

I have one link that is login-required http://example.com/secret If user access the page without authentication it will be redirected to http://example.com/login page.

My question is can Google bot index the /secret link? (I don't want it to be displayed on the Search results).

I'm confused because as this link it said:

It will show the source page in search results if it's temporary redirect (HTTP code 302)

and this link it said:

If you want to block your page from search results, use another method such as password protection

while /secret is also both password protection page and redirect source page. I'm not sure it will be indexed or not.

Answer 1

This is not an appropriate use of the redirect mechanism. The proper way to handle this is to serve a 401 (Not Authorized) header and include your login form in the response.

while /secret is also both password protection page and redirect source page. I'm not sure it will be indexed or not.

If /secret is password protected at the server level and is only reachable by logged in users then it doesn't get indexed and Googlebot never gets redirected.

If /secret' is not password protected at the server level, Googlebot will have the same experience as an un-authenticated user, so it will be redirected to /login via whichever temporary redirect you choose. This doesn't solve your index problem. Google's indexing pipeline is going to consider any temporary redirect as a weak signal that the target should be canonical.