Redirect (301 and 302)

Why it matters to a buyer

Using a 302 where a 301 was needed, or the reverse, is one of the more damaging small mistakes on a site migration or URL cleanup, because it changes whether Google treats the move as permanent enough to consolidate ranking signals onto the new URL. For a buyer overseeing any migration, redesign or domain change, confirming redirect type and destination for every changed URL is not optional detail work; it is close to the single biggest factor in whether existing rankings survive the change.

How it is measured or applied

Redirects are mapped one old URL to its single most relevant new URL, avoiding long chains where one redirect points to another redirect, since each extra hop adds delay and risk of signal loss. A 301 is used for any permanent move, a page rename, a site migration, a domain change, while a 302 is reserved for genuinely temporary situations, like an A/B test variant. Redirects are audited with a crawler that follows every URL to its final destination, flagging chains, loops and any redirect that unexpectedly returns an error instead of the intended page.