301 vs. 302 Redirects: What's the Difference?
Short answer
A 301 redirect tells machines a URL has moved permanently and its signals should transfer to the destination; a 302 signals a temporary move, keeping the original URL's standing intact. Choosing correctly preserves equity; choosing carelessly strands or delays it.
Redirect (301 vs 302) explained
The status codes encode intent. A 301 (permanent) instructs engines to update their index to the destination and consolidate the original URL's accumulated signals, links, history, standing, onto it; Google has confirmed for years that properly implemented 301s pass full value. A 302 (temporary) says the original URL will return, so the index should keep it as canonical while following the detour. Engines do treat long-lived 302s as de facto permanent eventually, but "eventually" is doing risky work in that sentence during a migration.
The rules are short. Content moved, consolidated, or retired in favor of a successor: 301, pointed at the closest equivalent destination, not a blanket homepage dump that reads as a soft 404. Truly temporary situations, tests, promotions, holding pages: 302. And chains, redirect through redirect through redirect, waste crawl and leak signal at every hop; flattening them is standing hygiene.
Redirects earn their reputation in migrations, where they're the entire mechanism by which a site's history survives a URL change. A complete old-to-new map, built page by page before launch, is the difference between a redesign that keeps its equity and one that donates years of it back to the index. Intent, encoded correctly, is the entire discipline.
In practice
Redirects are where this glossary's own launch practiced what it preaches: the old definitional posts were 301'd one-to-one into their glossary successors, each to its exact equivalent, executed only after the destinations were live, and the retired pages held as drafts until the redirects proved out. That's the migration discipline in miniature, and it's the part of redesigns I police hardest for clients, because a missing redirect map is how proud launches bleed years of accumulated equity.
Common misconception
People often use whatever redirect their plugin defaults to and move on. The codes make different promises to the index, and a 302 left on a permanent move can delay equity transfer through exactly the window it matters most.
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