301 vs 302 Redirect

301 Permanent or 302 Temporary Redirect?

Redirects are used to ‘redirect’ website visitors from one URL (page) to another. The reasons for doing so vary – you may be changing your domain name or redirecting newly purchased domain name to an existing one, changing structure of your website, temporarily disabling access to an old page.

The most commonly used redirects are 301 Permanent and 302 Temporary redirects.

301 (Permanent) Redirect – means that a URL has been permanently moved to a new one. From a search engines point of view, a 301 redirect ‘informs’ search engines that the old page is permanently redirected to a new page and the old URL will not be used anymore. As a result, search engines will re-index the new URLs.

302 (Temporary) Redirect – means that the URL has been only temporarily redirected to a new URL and is likely to change again soon.

It is recommended to use 301 Permanent Redirect for all redirects that are meant to be ‘permanent’. Search engines look at the destination (new) URL as the one to be indexed and shown on the search results pages. The important benefit is that the (external) link popularity and reputation assigned to an existing (old) page will be passed on to a new page, if permanent redirect is used.