Redirects are a way to forward traffic from your site’s visitors and search engine bots to a different page, when the old content has moved to a new location. Redirects are important because nobody, including bots, wants to run into a dead end.
Although there are five different types of redirects (301, 302, 303, 307, and 308), we will only focus on the first 2, as they are the ones used most often.
301 redirects indicate to search engines that a page’s URL, or its address on the web, has changed and has been permanently relocated to another location. This kind of redirect lets a search engine know that the original URL will not be coming back and to keep this new location as the final destination in its index. 301 redirects are the most common kind of redirect.
When it comes to how 301 redirects impact your SEO rating, Google has said that they pass all page rank along with them. This means that all of the value and authority built up from the old page location is transferred along to the new URL with that redirect.
When setting redirects for your page, it’s always best to make sure that the new location you are redirecting a page to closely matches the old page’s content. For example, if you choose to redirect a blog post about your favorite summer vacation destinations, you want to find a topic as similar as possible to that for the redirect. This provides a better visitor experience when they encounter a link that has been redirected, because otherwise, they could easily be confused. Imagine if they thought they were going to read your post on your favorite vacation spots, and instead, they get redirected to a recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
302 redirects let search engines know that a page’s URL has been temporarily moved, but that it will return at some point, and the search engine will not update its index for the page.
There was a time when 302 redirects did not pass the page rank onto the new destination page because it was only being used as a temporary measure. In 2016, however, Google announced that this type of redirect would indeed transfer the page value and authority, in the same way as 301 redirects. Despite this, it’s still best practice to only use a 302 redirect when the URL move is indeed temporary.
If you need to set up a redirect for a page or post on your WordPress.com site, you will need the help of a dedicated plugin. A couple of the more popular plugins for this are:
- Redirection↗︎ (currently only has support for 301 redirects)
- 301 Redirects↗︎ (supports 301, 302, and 307 redirects)
Redirects play a pivotal role in the digital landscape, ensuring that both visitors and search engines are efficiently guided to the correct page when content moves or changes. By skillfully implementing redirects, you can maintain a seamless user experience, preserve SEO rankings, and avoid the pitfalls of broken links. Utilizing tools and plugins for setting up redirects can further streamline this process, making it an indispensable practice for maintaining a robust and user-friendly online presence.
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