301 vs 302 Redirects – Which Should You Use?
While any website with a link to an external site will utilise 302 redirects, in this instance we are more concerned with internal redirects for the purpose of publishing updated pages.
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What is a Redirect?
A redirect is a way of sending website visitors from a requested page to a new destination.
What is a 301 Redirect?
A 301 redirect is used to permanently forward an old page to a new page whilst retaining the full link equity of the original page. All of the ranking power of the redirected page now resides with the new page on your website.
301 refers to the HTTP status code for a permanent redirect.
What is a 302 Redirect?
A redirect can be temporary or permanent.
A 302 redirect is a temporary move of the final destination. This lets the search engines know that it is not intended to be a permanent move and the link equity and ranking power should remain with the original page.
General Use of 302 Redirects (to external sites)
While 302 Redirects are created automatically whenever you link to an external website, they are rarely used correctly for internal redirection.
If you have Temporary 302 redirects, they should only be used very short term. An agency might use a 302 to show you a page design, for example, without affecting the original pages SEO.
What you should never have is 302s in place long term. A 302 redirect does not allow any authority to be built on the new page and no “link juice” is transferred to it from the origin page.
Can a Website Visitor Tell the Difference?
No.
A 301 and a 302 redirect appear to do the same thing to the end-user. They both seamlessly redirect you to a different destination page from the link address you original clicked.
However, the search engines see them as entirely different types of redirect.
Check For 302’s on Your Website
If you aren’t sure if you have any redirects on your website and you want to search for them, use SEO Spider.
Some 302’s Are Fine
If you have 302 links to YouTube videos or other pages on your website, they are valid 302’s.
Manually added links to your social sites, for example, will likely show up as 302’s and are also fine.
Most links to external websites will also be 302s. These are normal and don’t need to be changed.
What You’re Looking For
It is only links for moving pages on your own site that need to be 301.
Do 302 Redirects Hurt Your SEO?
They can in the short term.
If you are using a 302 to redirect a page but you should have used a 301, the search engines will at first, take the “temporary” nature of the 302 at face value. The SEO is retained by the original page.
Of course, if the 302 is there long enough, eventually the search engines will realise that it should have been a 301 and then start to treat it as such. This could take some time and will affect both the old page and the new one until they figure it out.
Eventually, the old page will be de-indexed and the new 301 will apply the link juice from the old page and start to attribute the normal SEO signals to your newer content location.
Until that happens, any SEO for the old page such as link popularity will likely be shared between the pages. That is assuming you are actively promoting your off-page SEO. This reduces the effectiveness and ultimately hurts your rankings.
Why Do People Use 302 Redirects
People will rarely use a 302 redirect for the purpose they are intended, a temporary move (redirect) of a page. Most often, 302’s are used accidentally.
The main reason is that 302’s are much easier to set up than a 301 redirect.
302 redirects are done very easily on the fly.
301's are harder to make
301’s tend to live in the .htaccess file on apache servers or require some ability to write PHP code. If you have a windows server you have to get into your IIS manager and manage them there.
This extra step of accessing the back-end of your website to set up the redirect correctly with a 301 often means 302’s are used for convenience or by mistake.
While it may be a “quick fix”, I think we’ve established that it’s not worth the risk of affected your SEO adversely.
Proper Use Of a 302 Redirect
If used correctly, using a 302 will have minimal impact on your SEO strategy and should not affect your rankings.
Here are some examples of how you could use a 302 on your website correctly.
Make the extra bit of effort and use 301’s where needed.
As always, please let us know if you found this content helpful.
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