Getting started with redirects
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A short on-ramp to redirects for teams who have not touched it before.
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
What it costs to ignore
A 301 passes ranking, a 302 does not. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Chained redirects slow everything and lose signal
- Change one thing and measure it
Map old URLs to new ones before launch, not after. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
In practice
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about redirects before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Chained redirects slow everything and lose signal — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.