301 vs 302 Redirects: The Complete Guide

A 301 redirect tells Google and every browser that visits it: this page moved permanently, and the new address is the one that counts now. That's the entire mechanism. Everything that matters about redirects follows from that single signal.

Most SEO guidance treats redirects as one step buried inside something bigger — a migration or a rebrand. But URLs change for smaller reasons too. You delete a page. You merge two categories. You rename a product. Redirects are the tool for all of it, and the rules stay the same whether you're moving one page or ten thousand. This is the standalone reference: what a 301 does, when a 302 is the better call, how to map redirects so they don't bleed rankings, and how long to leave them running.

Quick Navigation

• What a 301 Redirect Actually Does
• 301 vs. 302: The Difference That Actually Matters
• When to Use Something Other Than a 301
• How to Map Redirects Correctly
• Redirect Chains and Redirect Loops
• How Long to Keep Old Redirects in Place
• Common Redirect Mistakes to Avoid
• Frequently Asked Questions

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What a 301 Redirect Actually Does

A 301 redirect is a server response that tells browsers and search engines a URL has permanently moved, so future traffic and ranking signals should go to the new URL instead. The number comes from the HTTP status code: 301 means "Moved Permanently."

Here's what happens mechanically. A visitor (or Googlebot) requests the old URL. The server responds with a 301 status code and a new location in the header, before any page content loads. The browser follows automatically. Most users never see it happen — they click a link or open a bookmark and land on the new page without noticing anything changed underneath.

Redirects live at the server or platform level. WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow all ship with redirect managers built into the admin panel. Apache sites use .htaccess. Nginx uses server-block rules. CDN and edge platforms like Cloudflare and Vercel can handle redirects before a request even reaches your origin server. The tool varies. The status code and its meaning don't.

A single 301 is a small, mechanical fix. What gets complicated is deciding which URL should point where, and that decision is where most redirect strategies go wrong. A 301 redirect is also one piece of a bigger discipline — how a site's URLs, categories, and internal links hold together as the site grows. Brass-SEO's guide to content architecture covers that wider picture.

301 vs. 302: The Difference That Actually Matters

A 301 redirect signals a permanent move; a 302 signals a temporary one, and that distinction changes whether search engines swap the old URL for the new one in their index. A 301 tells Google to update the index and treat the new URL as the page going forward. A 302 tells Google the move might not stick, so the original URL often stays the one shown in search results.

For years, SEO folklore held that 301s pass more ranking value than 302s, and that stacking too many redirects of either type would slowly bleed a page's authority. Google has pushed back on that directly. Google's Search Advocate John Mueller has stated in Webmaster Central office-hours that 301 and 302 redirects both pass ranking signals in a similar way, and Google's Gary Illyes has confirmed there's no PageRank dilution from using either redirect type. The mechanism isn't fully published, but Google's own statements are consistent: use the technically correct redirect for what you're actually doing, not the one folklore says ranks better.

That leaves the real question: which one matches your situation?

Use a 301 when:

• A page is gone for good and a specific new page replaces it
• You're restructuring URLs, merging content, or renaming a section
• You're changing domains or moving to a new platform

Use a 302 when:

• You're running a short-term campaign or seasonal landing page
• A page is down for maintenance and will return
• You're A/B testing and want the original URL to stay canonical
• You genuinely intend to reverse the change later

Get this wrong in one direction and Google keeps showing a dead page in search results. Get it wrong in the other and you tell Google to permanently drop a URL you actually plan to bring back.

When to Use Something Other Than a 301

A 301 isn't the only tool for a URL problem, and reaching for it by default causes its own issues. Two situations call for something else entirely.

Use a canonical tag instead of a redirect when a page still exists and still serves visitors, but you have duplicate or near-duplicate versions competing for the same ranking. A product available at three category URLs doesn't need three redirects — it needs one canonical tag pointing to the version you want indexed, while the other two stay live and usable.

Use a 410 (Gone) instead of a 301 when a page is permanently removed and there's genuinely no equivalent to send visitors to. A discontinued product with no replacement, an event page for something that already happened, a service you no longer offer. A 410 is a stronger signal than a plain 404 — it tells Google the removal is intentional and it can stop rechecking the URL, rather than treating the absence as a possible temporary glitch.

The trap to avoid is redirecting out of guilt: forcing a 301 onto a URL just so it doesn't 404, when there's no real destination for it. That instinct is understandable, and it's also exactly the mistake covered next.

Getting the URL structure right in the first place cuts down how often you'll face this decision. Brass-SEO's guide to URL structure decisions that compound looks at designing URLs so fewer of them ever need to be redirected.

How to Map Redirects Correctly

Google's Search Relations team has said that blanket-redirecting deleted pages to a homepage gets treated as a soft 404 in Google's index — a redirect that technically resolves but passes little to no ranking value because the destination has nothing to do with the original page. Mass homepage redirects are the single most common mapping mistake, and Google has been explicit that it's the wrong move.

The correct approach: every removed page redirects to the most topically relevant surviving page, not to the homepage as a default. A blog post about "email marketing tips" that gets consolidated should redirect to the newer post covering that same topic, not to /blog or /. A discontinued product should redirect to the closest current substitute, not to the general product category if a closer match exists.

A working process for mapping:

1. Pull the old URL's traffic and backlink history from Google Search Console before deciding anything. High-traffic, high-link pages deserve the most careful mapping.
2. Read the actual content, not just the URL slug. Two pages can have similar URLs and completely different topics, or different URLs and the same core topic.
3. Find the closest live equivalent by subject, not by category structure. Topic match beats folder match every time.
4. When no good match exists, don't force one. A 410 or a plain 404 beats a redirect to a barely-related page.
5. Test the mapping like a visitor would. If someone clicked the old link expecting one thing and landed somewhere that doesn't answer their question, the redirect failed even if it returns a 200.

This is exactly the process behind redirect mapping during a full site migration — for the complete pre-launch, launch-day, and post-launch process, see Brass-SEO's site migration SEO checklist. What's covered here applies any time a URL changes, migration or not.

Redirect Chains and Redirect Loops

A redirect chain is one URL redirecting to another, which redirects to a third, and so on before a visitor reaches a live page. A redirect loop is the broken version of that: URL A redirects to B, and B redirects back to A, with no page ever actually loading.

Chains build up without anyone noticing, usually by accumulation. A page gets redirected during a 2023 cleanup. Two years later that same URL gets redirected again during a redesign. Nobody goes back to update the first redirect, so a visitor now hits two hops instead of one. Each additional hop is a separate request Googlebot has to make to reach the final page, and every one of those requests draws from the same crawl budget Google allocates to your site. A chain of five hops to reach one page is five requests spent on a single destination instead of five different pages getting crawled. On a large site, that adds up. Chains also add real latency for visitors, since each hop is a round trip to the server before the next redirect fires, and every extra link in the chain is one more point where the redirect can silently break.

Loops are worse, because they don't degrade — they fail outright. A browser or crawler that keeps getting bounced between the same two URLs eventually gives up. Chrome stops the request and tells the visitor the page redirected too many times. Googlebot abandons the crawl attempt entirely. A page caught in a loop is functionally invisible, whether or not the underlying content still exists.

The fix for both is the same: redirect every old URL straight to its final destination, not to an intermediate stop. When you retire a URL that's already redirecting somewhere else, update the original redirect to point directly at the new final target instead of chaining it. Periodically auditing existing redirects for chains and loops catches problems that build up unnoticed over years of site changes.

How Long to Keep Old Redirects in Place

There's no single agreed-on expiration date for a redirect, and any post that gives you an exact number of days is guessing. Google's own guidance is a floor, not a ceiling: keep redirects active for at least a year, long enough for Google's crawlers to revisit the old URL multiple times and fully process the change.

In practice, most redirects live far longer than that floor, because the thing that keeps sending traffic to the old URL never fully goes away. A blog post you wrote in 2019 might still have a link from a forum thread, a Reddit comment, or another site's resource page — and that link will keep sending clicks to the old URL indefinitely, whether or not you remember it exists. The redirect costs you almost nothing to maintain. Removing it costs you every visitor and every unit of link equity attached to a link you can no longer control or update.

The practical rule: redirect maintenance cost is close to zero, so there's rarely a reason to remove one. Reserve removal for cases where the old URL genuinely has no remaining external links or traffic and the redirect rule itself is adding real complexity to your configuration — a large, tangled redirect map on an old domain, for instance. Outside of that narrow case, treat redirects as a permanent part of your site's infrastructure, not a temporary patch you'll clean up later.

Common Redirect Mistakes to Avoid

Redirecting everything to the homepage. Covered above, and worth repeating: it's the most common mistake and Google treats it as a soft 404.

Using a 302 for a permanent change. If the old URL is never coming back, a 302 tells Google otherwise and can leave the wrong URL showing in search results for longer than it should.

Leaving internal links pointing at the old URL. A redirect fixes the external problem, but if your own site's navigation, footer, or blog posts still link to the old URL, every visitor and every crawl pass takes an unnecessary extra hop. Update internal links to point straight at the new URL once the redirect is live.

Not testing the redirect before and after launch. A redirect rule with a typo in the destination URL, or one that fires on the wrong condition, can silently send visitors to a 404 or the wrong page. Manually check the highest-traffic redirects after any change that touches them.

Redirecting to a page blocked by noindex or robots.txt. A redirect that lands on a page search engines can't index accomplishes nothing for rankings, even though it resolves correctly for a human visitor.

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Mapping redirects well means knowing which of your pages are actually worth protecting — the ones with real traffic, real backlinks, and real search visibility. Brass-SEO connects to your Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 data and answers plain-English questions about which pages matter most before you ever have to redirect one. A 3-day trial gets you started.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Do 301 redirects hurt my SEO?

Not when they're mapped correctly. A 301 to a genuinely relevant page passes ranking signals in a way Google has confirmed doesn't meaningfully differ from a direct link. The damage comes from bad mapping — redirecting to an unrelated page or the homepage — not from the redirect mechanism itself.

How many redirects in a chain is too many?

There's no official cutoff, but the guidance is simple: zero extra hops is the goal. Every hop past the first is added latency for visitors and added crawl requests for Google with no corresponding benefit. If an audit turns up a chain of two or more, collapse it to a single redirect straight to the final URL.

Can I redirect an old page to a completely different topic?

You can, but Google is likely to treat it as a soft 404 if the topic mismatch is significant, which means the redirect functions like a broken link even though it returns a 200 status. If no genuinely relevant page exists, a 410 or a plain 404 is more accurate than forcing an unrelated redirect.

Should I use a 301 or a 410 for a discontinued product page?

If a specific current product replaces it, use a 301 to that product. If nothing replaces it, a 410 is the more accurate signal — it tells Google the page is intentionally and permanently gone, rather than leaving Google to keep rechecking a URL that redirects somewhere unrelated.

Do I need to update my sitemap after adding redirects?

Yes. Sitemaps should only ever list live, current URLs — never redirected ones. An old URL that's now a 301 has no reason to appear in your XML sitemap; only the new destination URL belongs there.