How 301 and 302 redirects affect Search engine Rankings?
What are redirects?
Redirects, as layman describe, is Changing from Old to New. On the basis of context of the search engines, the Redirects can be defined as Error Code set up by the web server. The technical aspect of Redirects are html redirect or Meta refresh tags.
Causes of Redirects: We like changes, arent we? So, as a webmaster or website owner, you would not like to sit ideal and repeat the same url, designs and content for your domain. You would like to get new domain names, re-organize your websites or use a new content delivery system. May be you have a great website and probably you are reluctant to pre-suppose changes to your website but thats often not the case.
How redirects function?
When you change your URL, allot a new domain names, and re-organize your websites, its more obvious that you inform the sitemaps (Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines), but this is not the end of the road. After you change your Urls, people and search engines will find your OLD site while a relevant search is made. So here Redirection is the solution. With redirection, you can automatically send requests for the page at the old location to the new one. Just imagine what you do when you forward your phone calls or mails...just the same way you forward for the web pages. Your web server is responsible for all redirects and it does redirects from one place to another.
There are 4 types of redirects 301 redirects, 302 redirects, Meta redirects and Javascript redirects. Here we will discuss about two main types of Rredirects: 301 redirects and 302 redirects
a.301 Permanent Redirects: A 301 redirect is the web servers way of telling search engines that the page has moved permanently and you want people to know about the new address. For example, you change domains from oldsite.com to newsite.com and you want online visitors and search engines know that the new domain should be used in place of the old one(in a search engine friendly way). So the 301 redirection will be oldsite.com --- 301 Permanent Redirect ---> newsite.com
b.302 Temporary Redirection: A 302 is the web servers way of telling search engines that the page has moved temporarily. For example, you temporarily change domains from oldsite.com to newsite.com for some reasons and you want people and search engines to visit that place but not as a permanent change. So the 302 redirection will be oldsite.com --- 302 Temporary Redirect ---> newsite.com
Many SEO experts and guys from Profitimo.com believe that 301 is the better choice for webmasters. Lets have a look why!
How 301 and 302 redirects affect Search engine Rankings?
Now this is the one of the main arena you may be eyeing on for a long time. :) As I mentioned 301 is permanent redirection. Like you are guiding and suggesting the search bots that this redirection is permanent and this place will never change in future. So, in that case, we can the Search engine will transfer the existing value of your domain to the new one. The page rank will be slightly hampered but still you will manage to retain the same or better pagerank if you do not make any changes to the existing content. Let the search spiders recognize the NEW URL first, then you can experiment with your content. Thus, 301 redirect is much more search-engine friendly.
As far as 302 redirection is concerned, it is temporary. Temporary redirection can be due to some good reasons and so you want to shift your old domain but you will change the redirection in near future. So, in that case, the Search engine will not transfer the value of the old domain to the new one. Another alarming cause as to why it is not search engine friendly is that if you keep this 302 temporary redirection, it will badly affect your rankings. So avoid this. So, we can conclude by saying Cheers for 301 Redirect
