Redirects and Status Codes

Track 3 · Lesson 3 of 6 · about 15 minutes

Redirects and status codes

Every URL you have ever published is a small asset with links, bookmarks and index history attached. Redirects are how that value survives change — or leaks away three per cent at a time.

The codes that matter

301 — moved permanently. Consolidates signals to the destination; the index gradually replaces the old URL. Your default for anything retired.
302/307 — moved temporarily. The original URL is expected back, so the index keeps it. Correct for maintenance windows and A/B routing; wrong — and surprisingly common — for permanent moves, where it leaves the dead URL haunting the index for months.
404 — not found. 410 — gone on purpose; a slightly stronger removal hint that tends to clear the index a little faster.
Soft 404 — the impostor: a page that returns 200 while containing nothing. “No results found” pages and emptied categories are the classics. Google classifies them as errors anyway; better to send the honest code.

Redirect to the closest equivalent, or admit the 404

The destination rule: a retired URL should land somewhere that serves the same intent. A discontinued product to its successor or category — fine. Everything swept to the homepage — Google treats those as soft 404s, because the destination does not answer what the URL promised. When no equivalent exists, an honest 404/410 is genuinely better than a misleading redirect. Not every death needs a forwarding address.

Chains and loops

Every migration adds a layer: A moved to B in 2022, B to C in 2024, C to D last month. Googlebot follows a limited number of hops per attempt, browsers pay latency per hop, and equity consolidation gets less reliable with each step. The discipline is flattening: whenever you add a redirect, update every earlier rule pointing into the chain so all legacy URLs go straight to the final destination. A crawler makes finding chains trivial; fixing them is an afternoon that pays for years.

Internal links should never need redirects

Redirects are for the outside world — links you cannot edit. Your own internal links should point directly at final URLs. A site whose navigation bounces through its own redirect layer is spending crawl time and latency to correct a mistake it could simply stop making.

Going deeper: redirects in WordPress · technical SEO guides.