The 301 And 302 Redirects Impact On SEO!

The confusion continues in the year 2019 and which redirect should people use for SEO remains a question. To keep it short a redirect’s motive is to send both the user and the search engine to a different URL from the original one (where the request was generated). There can be several reasons to why you want to redirect a URL?

1. The Link is broken

2. You created a new website or page and didn’t need the old one.

3. The most important reason, when you are improving or fixing a webpage.

The motives behind redirection no doubt can affect your SEO efforts, so make sure you don’t make the wrong choice. Plus, if you choose the correct redirect, your current rankings and reputation are not going anywhere.

When And Why Should You Choose A 301 Or 302 Redirect

The primary motive of this type of redirection is to send a message to search engines that the page has moved permanently. The word permanent here means around a year or longer and still after a year if you are receiving redirects you need to find where they are coming from before killing the redirects.

People use these redirects to solve variations of the brand, misspellings in a brand name, etc. People buy domains that match their original name because either the similar domains have high DA (domain authority) or if the user accidentally misspelled the name can still be redirected to the original one.

Typically people forget to add WWW before a website name, The 301 redirects help in deciding which domain is your default website or page. A permanent redirect will always take the users to the default site even if the users do not add the WWW.

Also, if you have sites that have outdated uniform resource links or have merged two websites, then 301 redirect is a better choice.

A 302 redirect is used to let search engines know that the page or a site has moved temporarily. The reason why should you choose this type of redirect is if you are updating your website or redeveloping it. So, if you have planned to bring the old page back then 302 is what you need to go for, you can always use this redirect if you want to check a new page out without affecting your ranks as well.

Redirection Effects On SEO

As now you already know the purpose of these redirections, the 301 moves the page or site permanently and 302 transfers it temporarily, the impact on SEO relies on your decision.

The 301 takes all your efforts of SEO to the page you are redirecting to, this means whatever you did to make your site rank better is not lost but it definitely takes time for search engines to notice the change, which is why you need to be patient plus don’t confuse it with other redirects.

The 302 redirect doesn’t affect the SEO of your original site or page. The temporary movement of site/page tells search engines that we will be back to our default page or website in no time, so don’t affect the rankings of that domain.

The only problem that people face is when they aren’t aware of the differences and choose the wrong redirection like 302 for a permanent redirect. This way your new site will never be optimized, which is why it is essential to understand the differences between these two redirects.