301 vs 302 Re-Directs

If you are a beginner to SEO, which is most likely why you are reading this blog, unless you are my mother, and in that case, Hi Mom!, you are probably hearing a lot of numbers involved with SEO and don’t know what they mean.  301, 302, 404, oh my!  Let me break down for you briefly what each of these are.  As a note, if you have read any of the posts on this blog before, you are not going to get a text book definition, but a real life definition, explained by how my brain works and how it will help you remember.

301vs 302 Re-directs

A 301 is a type re-direct that is used to forward one page to another.  You see these all the time and you may not know it.  If you go to URL #1, and then all of a sudden you end up at URL #2 without you doing anything, than you were re-directed.  Whether it is a 301 or a 302 re-direct you won’t know simply by seeing the re-direct happen.  A 301 re-direct is more SEO friendly because it passes along any and all SEO value that URL #1 may have had.  Meaning that if you had a page that was ranking well and had a lot of links pointing to that page, but one day you decided to change the URL of that page.  You would want to implement a 301re-direct from the old page to the new page.  As long as you use a 301 instead of a 302, then all of those links pointing to the old URL will be passed along to the new URL and you will not lose any SEO value.

A 301 re-direct is a permanent re-direct.  Meaning that the old URL is gone, it’s not coming back.  A 302 re-direct is a temporary or soft re-direct meaning that you may bring that URL back in the future.  For this reason, the search engines do not pass along the SEO value that goes along with these type of re-directs.

Hopefully these examples and brief definitions help you make more sense of the re-directs.

404 Error Page

A 404 is a code that is returned when the page you are trying to access does not exit.  You see these on a daily basis.  A 404 error page is not the worst thing in the world.  If you know that a page is not active anymore, it is a good idea to implement a 301 re-direct.  If a visitor tries to access a page that does not exist, let’s say a misspelling of a url, then they will be sent to the 404 error page.  Creating a custom 404 page can help search engines navigate to key pages throughout your site, but it also gives your visitors an opportunity to find high value pages within your site.

That is the brief explanation of the 301, 302 and 404 codes that you may receive on your site, and what to do with them.