A short guide to redirects

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Everything we would tell a client about redirects in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

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. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The practical version

Chained redirects slow everything and lose signal. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Common failure modes

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. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What this looks like day to day

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
• 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

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