Redirect is a way of sending users and search engines from one URL to another. There are two types of redirects – 301 and 302.
This article is about the differences between 301 and 302 redirects, so you will know which redirect to use when, and how.
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What is 301 redirect?
A 301 redirect means that the page has been permanently moved to a new URL.
301 is a permanent redirect. It takes users to the new URL and indicates a permanent URL to the search engine. This redirect tells the search robots that the page has been moved to a new address and may exclude the original page from indexing.
When you transfer an old domain to a new one, 301 redirect is the best way to maintain all website ranking in search engines.
When to use 301 redirects
- To permanently change the URL of a webpage.
- To migrate permanently to a new domain.
- To switch from HTTP to HTTPS.
- www/non-www to fix duplicate content.
- To permanently change the URL structure of the website.
- For 404 pages and content that has lost relevance.
While moving the entire site, it retains all the results of the work already done, domain authority, and ranking in search.
What is 302 redirect?
A 302 redirect is a temporary change that redirects users and search engines to a new URL for a limited period of time until the redirect is removed.
Due to this temporary change, the 302 redirect is not considered important by the search engine. They’ll use it when crawling your site, but they’ll treat the original link as the real link.
When to use 302 redirects
- During the implementation of technical work (Site maintenance).
- To test the functionality or design of a web page when performing A/B testing.
- To temporarily redirect visitors to the Sales page while the promotion is running.
- If it is necessary to hide a specific page from the visitor.
- Traffic coming from a specific domain is temporarily redirected to another resource.
302 redirects do not pass PageRank or link juice from the old URL to the new URL. By doing this essentially all your site values will remain on the old URL. The old URL will be indexed and appear in search results, but users will be redirected to the new URL when they click on it.
How does redirection affect SEO?
If you are moving a web page or entire website to a new URL. If you change your domain name, you want visitors to be able to find your old site. Due to Redirect, users automatically change from the old location to a new location.
Redirecting will not cause much harm to your SEO. Between 90-99% of your site’s ranking will transfer when you change your entire domain name, so there’s no harm in redirecting a few pages. Especially only on 301 redirects. 302 redirects are temporary, and have no immediate impact on your ranking, but can drag down your ranking in the long run if you don’t switch to 301.
If Google detects that a 302 redirect has been used in error, in that case, it treats the redirect as a 301. Meaning in that case it indexes the new URL. Google tends to consider 302 redirects to be permanent when redirecting to an established page or site.
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