Been doing some research lately on the effects 301 and 302 redirects have in different situations in regards to SEO. So I thought I would take the time to explain the difference between the two types of redirects. So what’s the difference between a 301 Redirect and a 302 Redirect? Here is the simplest way to explain it…

301 Redirect = A Permanent Redirect

302 Redirect = A Temporary Redirect

Here’s an image from Searchengineland.com that visually demonstrates this explanation…

301’s Great for Canonicalization

According to Matt Cutts (the search engine super master genius at google) Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, they try and pick the url that seems like the best representative. For example all of these URL’s go to the same destination, but only one of them best represents the site.

• www.example.com
• Example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• Example.com/home.php

So basically put, Matt Cutts recommends that if you want http://www.example.com/ to be your default URL, you would need to use a 301 redirect to redirect http://example.com/ to http://www.example.com . Make sense? This helps Google know which URL you would like to be Canonical.

What is a 302 Redirect?

A 302 Redirect basically uses the 302 http status code which means that a page has temporarily moved. There are actually 2 different occurrences of 302’s. The first is an “On-Domain” 302 redirects which you can use to redirect a page to another page without affecting the SEO benefits of the original page. If you’ve ever seen a company’s homepage redirect to a special landing page for a special they are offering that month, an on-domain 302 redirect is the perfect redirect for that situation.

The other is an off-domain 302 redirect which of course, redirects from one domain to another. 99% of the time Google will crawl/index/return the contents of the final destination page. So for example of A.com has a 302 redirect to B.com, Google is going to crawl and index the contents of B.com. However from time to time Google will crawl the original destination or A.com if they think it’s a better, more relevant page for the end user.

Is There A Difference In Speed?

I was recently asked this question and thought I might mention it here. Is there a difference in page load speed between the two redirects? In my experience there is not. The only thing that can really alter the page load speed of these redirects is the response time of the DNS servers, web servers involved, and what kind of Cookies or tracking URL’s are being passed through.

A recent experience I have dealt with is a bunch of redirects that are going through 4 cookies and multiple tracking URL’s, which is causing these domains to take 2 and even sometimes 5 seconds to make the redirect to the final destination. A huge problem for me of course! But as far as the speed difference between the two types of redirects, I have not seen any!

Use 301 Redirects When You Can

My conclusion with all this is to use 301 Redirects most of the time, or whenever you can, with the exception of on-domain redirects that are temporary. Then for those you would use 302’s. The reason is mainly because with a 301 redirect you are able to pass on Page Rank with Google and ranking with other search engines to the redirected page. The only times I personally have had to use 302 redirects are when I want my Homepage to go to a special landing page for a specific period of time. For conversion purposes of course. But because that page is temporary, I don’t want Google to look at it as my new page. So I use a 302 Redirect. Make sense?