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SEO has a thousand facets. As website operators, our goal is to keep up with all of them for maximum organic ranking. However, technology changes rapidly, and old wisdom often becomes outdated. When it comes to redirects, it’s important to understand the different types, as they may negatively affect the site’s search engine rankings. Incorrectly handled redirects can also cause a loss of traffic, according to Small Business Computing.
What’s the Difference between a 301 and a 302 Redirect?
For starters, let’s go over the definitions:
301 Redirect: This is a permanent move, not suitable for temporary changes. Webmasters generally use it in three cases. The first is for bad links or outdated URLs that need to go to a desired page. The second is when visitors can reach your site through several URLs. In that case, one URL is the preferred destination, and the others use 301 redirects to send traffic to it. The third is when you’ve moved your site to a new domain.
302 Redirect: This is a temporary change. It redirects users and search engines to the desired page for a short time period until you remove it. It may appear as a 302 found (HTTP 1.1) or moved temporarily (HTTP 1.0). You can set up a 302 redirect using a metatag or Javascript. That avoids accessing server files and the additional time and effort a 301 redirect needs. A 302 is suitable if a company is doing A/B testing of different sites for marketing purposes. It also works when updating a site and temporarily relocating visitors.
The Old Wisdom about 301 vs. 302
A quick surf around the Internet uncovers a common claim. It says a 301 redirect may result in a 10 to 15 percent loss in linking for SEO. As a result, many Webmasters still routinely substitute 302 links. At other times, the conventional wisdom has been the opposite. So which is true today?
Google search engine guru Matt Cutts has spent a lot of time laying out the differences between 301 and 302. (Here’s a video that helps explain the basics.)
The conclusion is that there are tradeoffs that make them roughly equal.
Cutts put it this way: “Use whatever is best for your purposes. You don’t get to horde or conserve any more page rank if you use a 301, and likewise, it doesn’t hurt you if you use a 301.”
But What about Other Search Engines?
SearchEngineLand contributor Bryson Meunier recently confirmed that this is the case with Google. However, he pointed out that Google isn’t the only search engine in the world. Bing still prefers that Webmasters use a 301 permanent redirect when moving content, if the move is permanent.
“If you’re optimizing for users in China, where Google currently only has 1.5 percent of the market, you probably care more about what Baidu and Shenma say about redirects than Google or Bing, and you should use permanent redirects for permanently moved URLs just to be safe,” he wrote.
If you’re not sure what the best redirect strategy would be for your situation, contact Keyword Performance for a free consultation. We’re always happy to take time to educate our clients about SEO and the reasoning’s behind tactics.
We are an ethical search engine optimization and social media company. Our focus is to build professional marketing strategies for long-term keyword placement on search engines and social media platforms. These strategies support product, service, and company branding. We develop solutions for companies to expose their websites on the search engines. We also help them build brands on a local, national, and international level.
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