301 vs 302 Redirects: Which One Should You Actually Use?

The one-sentence difference

A 301 redirect means "this has moved permanently — treat the new URL as the real one going forward." A 302 means "this has moved temporarily — keep treating the original URL as the real one." That single distinction in permanence is what determines how search engines actually handle ranking signals during the redirect, and getting it backwards is one of the more common, quietly damaging technical SEO mistakes.

Why this distinction actually matters for rankings

When a page redirects with a 301, search engines are being told the move is permanent, so they consolidate the original page's ranking signals — accumulated authority, backlinks, ranking history — onto the new URL, and the old URL gradually stops being treated as the "real" version at all.

A 302 tells search engines the opposite: this is temporary, so keep the original URL as the one that should stay indexed and ranked, and treat the destination as a short-term detour rather than the new permanent home. If a 302 is left in place for months or years for something that was actually a permanent change, search engines may keep the wrong URL indexed indefinitely, or the ranking signals never properly transfer to where they should now genuinely live.

When each one is actually correct

Use a 301 for a genuinely permanent change: a page moved to a new URL for good, a domain migration, consolidating duplicate content into one canonical page, or removing a page and pointing visitors to its closest permanent replacement.

Use a 302 for something genuinely temporary: a page down briefly for maintenance, a limited-time promotional page that will revert to the original URL afterward, or A/B testing where the original URL needs to remain the canonical one during the test.

The mistake that actually causes the most damage

Using a 302 for something that was always meant to be permanent — very often just because it's the default behavior in a lot of CMS platforms and hosting panels, and nobody went back to change it once the "temporary" redirect quietly became permanent in practice. The result: ranking signals stay parked on a URL that no longer meaningfully exists in the site's structure, while the actual current page never receives the authority it should have inherited.

This is worth checking specifically after any site migration or URL restructuring — confirming the redirects actually used were 301s, not whatever a platform defaulted to.

How to actually check which type is being used

Redirects aren't visible from just looking at a page in a browser — the browser follows them automatically and shows you the final destination, not the type of redirect that got you there. Checking the actual HTTP status code is what reveals this — a real site crawl reports the exact status code for every redirect it encounters, which is the only reliable way to confirm a redirect is genuinely a 301 and not a 302 masquerading as a permanent move.

A related mistake worth knowing about: JavaScript-based redirects

Some redirects happen entirely in client-side JavaScript rather than as a real server-level HTTP response — the page loads, then a script fires and sends the visitor elsewhere. Search engines can generally follow these, but far less reliably than a genuine server-level 301, and it's a meaningfully weaker signal for consolidating ranking authority. A real server-level 301 is the more dependable choice whenever the actual server configuration allows for it.

The realistic takeaway

The rule genuinely is that simple: permanent means 301, temporary means 302, and the single most common real-world mistake is a redirect that started temporary and quietly became permanent without anyone ever going back to actually update its type. Worth a periodic check specifically for that — not because 302s are inherently wrong, but because they're frequently used well past the point where they should have become 301s.