A redirect sends anyone visiting an old URL straight to a new one, and the two you will reach for most are the 301 and 302 redirects. They look almost identical in a browser, but to a search engine they say very different things: one is permanent and passes your ranking value, the other is temporary and does not.
Pick the wrong one and you can quietly leak the rankings you spent years earning. So this is less about the codes themselves and more about matching the right redirect to what you actually intend, which is where most sites slip up.
Key Takeaways
- A 301 is a permanent redirect and passes nearly all link equity to the new URL.
- A 302 is a temporary redirect; the original URL stays the one search engines rank.
- Use 301 for moves, rebrands, and content merges; use 302 for maintenance, tests, and short promos.
- The common, costly mistake is defaulting to a 302 for a change you actually mean to keep.
- Avoid redirect chains and loops; point the old URL straight at the final destination.
What a 301 redirect is, and when to use it
A 301 is a permanent redirect. It tells search engines the page has moved for good, so they update their index to the new URL and pass nearly all of the old page’s link equity, the link juice that carries its ranking power, across to the new one. Google confirms this in its redirects documentation.
Reach for a 301 whenever the change is meant to stick. The clearest cases are permanently moving a post to a new URL, migrating to a new domain after a rebrand, and consolidating several overlapping pages into one stronger page. In all three you want the new URL to inherit the old one’s rankings, and only a 301 does that cleanly.
What a 302 redirect is, and when to use it
A 302 is a temporary redirect. It says \”this detour is short-lived, the original will be back,\” so search engines keep indexing and ranking the original URL and do not move its link equity to the temporary one. That is exactly what you want when the original page is coming back.
Good uses for a 302 are genuinely temporary: a page pulled offline for maintenance, a short-term promotion or seasonal sale you will switch off, or an A/B test sending some traffic to a trial version of a page. In each case you are protecting the original URL’s standing, not handing it over.
301 vs 302 at a glance
| 301 (permanent) | 302 (temporary) | |
|---|---|---|
| Signal to search engines | The page has moved for good | The move is temporary |
| Link equity | Passes to the new URL | Stays with the original URL |
| Which URL gets indexed | The new one | The original one |
| Best for | Moves, rebrands, merging pages | Maintenance, tests, short promos |
| Common mistake | Chaining several 301s together | Using it for a permanent change |
The mistake that quietly leaks rankings
Here is the one I see most in audits: people default to a 302 for a change they actually mean to keep. It often happens by accident, because some plugins, frameworks, and server configs issue a 302 (or a 307) unless you tell them otherwise. The page redirects fine for visitors, so nobody notices, but the new URL never inherits the rankings and you wonder why traffic slid.
Google has said that if a 302 stays in place long enough, it will often start treating it like a 301 anyway. I would not lean on that, because you are handing Google both the timing and the interpretation, and you can lose months of ranking power while it decides. Send the correct signal from day one and there is nothing to second-guess.
The other quiet leak is redirect chains: old URL to a second URL to a third, instead of straight to the final page. Each hop wastes crawl budget and bleeds a little equity, so always point the original URL directly at its final destination. In WordPress you can manage all of this from a redirects tool like Rank Math’s Redirections module or the dedicated Redirection plugin, both of which let you set the type explicitly so you are never guessing. For the full set of status codes beyond these two, I broke down 301, 302, 307, 410, and 451 redirects in a separate guide.
If you want the underlying spec, MDN’s reference on HTTP redirections lays out exactly what each status code means at the protocol level.
So which redirect should you reach for?
Default to a 301 for anything you intend to keep. If the old URL is gone for good, a 301 is the only choice that protects the ranking power you built, and it is the one I use for the overwhelming majority of redirects. Reach for a 302 only when you can honestly say the original page is coming back, like a maintenance window or a sale that ends.
The simple test: ask whether the change is permanent. If yes, 301. If it is truly temporary, 302. Get that one decision right, avoid chains, and your 301 and 302 redirects will preserve rankings instead of quietly draining them.
Update Logs
28 Jun 2026
- Rewritten with a clear 301-vs-302 comparison table, the real-world mistake of defaulting to a 302, and added Google and MDN references with a firmer verdict.
Want our posts to show up more often on Google?
One step & Google will surface this site in your Top Stories.
