Redirects for small teams

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Most advice about redirects assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to keep

A 301 passes ranking, a 302 does not. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

How we handle it

Map old URLs to new ones before launch, not after. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

How to tell if yours is fine

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. 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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.