301 vs 302 Redirects: Which to Use and When

A redirect answers a browser's request for one URL with directions to another — and the three-digit code you choose tells search engines whether the move is forever or temporary, which decides where rankings and link equity live afterwards. The 301-vs-302 question is genuinely simple once stated plainly, the edge cases are worth five minutes, and the redirect hygiene rules at the end prevent the slow leaks that afflict most older sites. Here's the whole subject.

The two codes, plainly

301 — Moved Permanently. "The page lives at the new URL now; forget the old one." Search engines transfer indexing and consolidated signals to the destination, and Google has confirmed for years that 301s pass full PageRank. This is the code for: site moves, http→https, URL restructures, merged pages from the cannibalization playbook, retired products pointing to successors — any change you don't intend to reverse.

302 — Found (temporary). "The content is over there for now; keep the original indexed." The old URL retains its identity; signals stay put. Correct for: genuine temporaries — A/B tests, geo/language routing, seasonal swaps ("sale page live this month"), maintenance detours. In practice Google treats long-lived 302s as de facto 301s eventually — but "eventually" is ambiguity you never needed, so say what you mean with the right code from day one.

The decision rule in one line: will the old URL ever come back as itself? No → 301. Yes → 302.

The neighbours worth knowing

• 307/308 — the strict-HTTP twins of 302/301 (method-preserving); SEO-equivalent, seen mostly in APIs and HSTS internals.
• Meta refresh and JS redirects — last resorts when server config is out of reach; slower, honoured less reliably, and invisible to strict crawlers. Server-side or bust where you can help it.
• 410 Gone — not a redirect but the honest sibling: "deleted on purpose, nothing replaces it." Better than a soft redirect-to-homepage for content with no successor.

Redirect hygiene: where the equity leaks

1. Chains. A→B→C→D: each hop adds latency, spends crawl attention, and risks partial signal loss. After migrations, flatten every chain to single hops — old URLs point directly at final destinations. Chains breed silently across successive redesigns; the crawl finds them in minutes.
2. Redirected internal links. Your own pages should link to final URLs, never through redirects — the internal link audit's standing item. Redirects are for the outside world's stale links, not your own navigation.
3. The redirect-everything-to-homepage move. Bulk-pointing dead URLs at the root is treated as a soft 404 — signals dropped, not transferred. Redirect to the most relevant equivalent or serve an honest 410; relevance is what makes a 301 carry.
4. Backlinked 404s left unredirected. The reverse leak, and the cheapest fix in SEO: every dead URL with inbound links deserves a 301 to its closest living relative — equity reclaimed with one config line, per the audit's plumbing step.
5. Forgetting redirects are forever. Old URLs stay linked and bookmarked for years; pruning "ancient" redirect rules re-breaks them. Keep the map (the deletions-get-rows discipline) and let rules live.

Migration redirects, compressed

The URL guide's playbook applies wholesale: exact-counterpart 301 mapping (page→page, never all→home), internal links updated to new URLs directly, backlink-weighted pages triple-checked, chains flattened, old sitemap briefly discoverable so crawlers process the moves, and expect weeks of wobble as the recrawl digests it. The single metric that predicts migration success: percentage of old URLs with a correct one-hop 301 — push it to 100 before launch, not after.

Frequently asked questions

Do 301s lose PageRank anymore?

Google's position since 2016: no dilution from 3xx redirects per se. Losses that still happen come from the hygiene failures above — irrelevant destinations, chains, soft-404 treatment — not from the code itself.

How long do rankings take to transfer after a 301?

Per-URL, on recrawl: days for important pages, weeks for deep ones, with sitewide migrations settling over one to a few months. Signals consolidate progressively — hold nerve, keep the mapping intact, and resist "fixing" mid-settle.

Can I ever remove old redirects?

After a year-plus you may — once external links to the old URLs have been updated or lost their traffic — but rules cost nothing to keep, and deleting them re-404s any surviving backlinks. Default: keep forever. The equity you preserve is exactly the kind you'd otherwise pay to re-earn (which we also do, but plumbing first).