When redirects is worth the effort

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Redirects is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

When it is worth it

A 301 passes ranking, a 302 does not. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

How to decide

Map old URLs to new ones before launch, not after. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.