If you have your own website, you have most likely encountered several situations where one of your pages is no longer needed. The information may be outdated, or you may no longer sell that type of product or service. Perhaps you are moving your entire website to a new domain, or you have just obtained an SSL certificate. To handle obsolete or outdated pages, it is recommended that you create a redirect with status code 301. Why? What makes a 301 more suitable than a 302? In which cases should you implement a redirect? That is what we will explain today.
Difficult to delete a page from the web
First of all, we recommend using a 301 redirect because it is difficult to truly delete a page from the internet. As long as the URL exists somewhere online, it can still be accessed. Googlebot has most likely already indexed it and will revisit it at some point. When that happens, the page will return a 404: page not found. Even if you remove all internal links on your site and apply a noindex tag to the landing page, you are still not completely safe. If an external party has linked to the page, it can still be reached and will return a 404 response.
Googlebot is smart, however. After it has visited your 404 page a certain number of times and notices that it is never recreated, it will eventually deindex the page on its own, since it no longer serves any purpose for visitors. Your site may lose a bit of ranking because Google considers the site to be poorly maintained, but you will not drop to the bottom or have your entire site deindexed due to a few 404 errors. And if you have applied a noindex tag yourself, Google will respect that and not index the page. So why not just do that?
User experience
When browsing the web and clicking a link, few things are as frustrating as being met with a 404 page. You clicked the link because you were interested in the information, and you feel let down when someone has removed the page entirely without guiding you to an alternative destination.
Some users will go back to the search results and choose another website—the first one clearly cannot be trusted. In this way, you can lose visitors. 404 errors make your site less user-friendly, something neither visitors nor Google appreciate.
You lose link equity & PageRank
One of the most important reasons to implement a proper 301 redirect is to preserve the link equity and PageRank that the outdated page may have accumulated. If the page previously ranked well or attracted backlinks, you naturally want to retain that value while offering better and more up-to-date information.
If you are moving your entire site to a new domain, redirects are absolutely crucial. Otherwise, your visitors will lose track of you and you will have to start over without rankings or backlinks.
It is not possible to transfer 100% of PageRank with a 301 redirect, and there are no definitive answers as to how much equity is passed along. However, we know from Google’s own experts that some amount of link equity and ranking is transferred through a 301 redirect.
Exceptions when PageRank & link equity are not transferred
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. One such case is when you redirect to a URL that does not contain information equivalent to that of the old page. In that situation, Googlebot may instead treat the redirected page as an entirely new page, and any previous ranking may not be carried over.
This is why redirects must be implemented thoughtfully. In the past, it was common to simply redirect everything to the homepage. Today, we know this is not a good approach. There is a risk that Googlebot will interpret this as completely new content, causing the page to lose PageRank and any authority gained from previous backlinks. Instead, you should redirect to a page that contains information as similar as possible to the original.
Example:
If you have a page where you sell chrome floor lamps, but you no longer sell chrome floor lamps, you naturally want to redirect that page to another relevant location on your site.
In this case, the best option would be to create a 301 redirect to a page that largely contains the same type of information.
If, on the other hand, you have stopped selling floor lamps altogether, you should instead redirect to a more general or relevant category page.
Why not use a 302?
Status code 302 is often the default redirect status used by various platforms. As a result, many people quickly fix their own or their clients’ websites using 302 redirects. In some cases, it is simply more time-consuming to implement proper 301 redirects. If you want to create a 301 redirect and your site is hosted on an Apache server, you need to edit the site’s .htaccess file. There are additional steps required if you are using a Windows server. If you have a WordPress site, however, there are no excuses—thanks to simple plugins, you can create redirects yourself without involving a developer.
Status code 302 essentially means that the page is “temporarily moved.” It signals that the content is only available at the new location temporarily, which means Googlebot does not need to transfer PageRank or pay much attention to the URL. A 301 redirect, on the other hand, means that the page is “permanently moved,” and the original URL will never be active again.
There are very few situations where a 302 redirect is more appropriate than a 301. These mainly involve cases where you need to temporarily move your site while the original is being rebuilt or repaired. It can also be useful for temporary products, such as those available only during holidays.
It is worth repeating: Google is smart. In many cases, Googlebot can understand that you intended a 301 even if you implemented a 302 redirect. But that does not mean it is worth taking the risk!
