Hi all, here is the situation.
A website I'm working on has a small percentage of almost empty pages. Those pages are filled "dynamically" and could have new content in the future, so, instead of 404ing them, we automatically noindex them when they're empty and remove the noindex once they have content again.
The problem is that, due to technical issues we can't solve at the moment, some internal links (and URLs listed in sitemaps) to almost empty pages remain live also when pages are noindexed.
In order not to waste Google crawler's time, sending it to noindexed pages through those links, someone suggested us to redirect those pages to our homepage with a 302 (not a 301 since they could become indexable again, so it can't be a permanent redirect). We did that, but after some weeks Search Console reported an increase in soft 404s: we checked it and it is 100% related to the 302 implementation.
The questions are: is this a correct use of 302 redirects? Is there a better solution we haven't thought about? Maybe is it better to remove 302s and go back to the past situation, since linking to noindexed pages isn't such a big problem?
Thank you so much!
