How to get redirects right
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The short answer to redirects is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
The reason this keeps coming up
A 301 passes ranking, a 302 does not. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Chained redirects slow everything and lose signal
- Map old URLs to new ones before launch, not after
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Map old URLs to new ones before launch, not after. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
Turning this into a decision
The short version
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
- A 301 passes ranking, a 302 does not — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.