301 and 302 Redirecting Scripts – More than mere numbers?

You can use two types of redirections for your site – 301 and 302. “301” means permanent redirections and “302” implies temporary redirections. These numbers refer to the HTTP Status Code returned by the server for a given URL.  301 redirects and notifies the spider that URL for the requested page has been permanently moved to a new URL and 302 redirect guides the search engine that the page redirection is only temporary and you may get original content on that very page in future without a redirect.

301 Redirects:

All search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing understand 301 (permanent redirection), that means their spiders directly crawl the destination URL and ignore the original URL.

E.g.:  http://www.abc.com/SEO-Tips.html use 301 redirects to http://www.def.com/SEO-Tips.html

Google, Yahoo and Bing show www.def.com domain page when any one searches for “SEO Tips”

When you want to redesign your website 301 redirects will be very useful for redirecting your site, URL rewriting and URL shorting.

302 Redirects:

Google handles 302 redirects differently and that’s why 302 redirects are typically not recommended. Google’s indexing of the redirected URL depends on the condition of the new URL being off-domain or on-domain.

E.g: On-Domain  http://seotips.com use 302 and is redirected to http://abc.com

If you search seotips.com in Google, the result it shows is http://abc.com because

http://seotips.com has now been pointed to http://abc.com which, in turn, uses a 302 redirect to the destination page

In simple layman’s terms, it can be proposed that 301 redirects are for permanent redirection, whereas 302 redirects are for temporary redirects. Both have their own significance in SEO terms and webmasters must be pretty specific in using them.

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