Redirects, explained without the jargon

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Here is redirects without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The short version

A 301 passes ranking, a 302 does not. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

Chained redirects slow everything and lose signal. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Where to go from here

Map old URLs to new ones before launch, not after. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

In practice

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about redirects before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Map old URLs to new ones before launch, not after — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.