A beautiful, functional and well-optimized website is the standard for every serious business today. Sometimes during the life of the site there is a need to change some things, improve them and make the user experience better. One such need is to redirect (redirect) the address of one page to another URL address, i.e. page, which we believe will provide a better user experience and which will ultimately provide more benefits to our business. However, the question arises as to how redirections affect SEO, i.e. whether they can harm the site in the search results. This is especially important if we have a page that is well positioned for a specific keyword.

What is a page redirect?

Redirection is the term used to refer to the forwarding of one URL to another. Redirecting a page usually means giving the page a completely new URL. The act of redirection is quite simple and often used. These redirects are not visible to site users. When set up correctly, an instant redirection will occur that no one will even notice. In order to know how redirects affect SEO, it is important to know what types of redirects exist, what they are used for, and when they are used. When done correctly, redirects won’t hurt your SEO. On the other hand, if done incorrectly, they can adversely affect your ranking in search results. There are free tools that you can use to verify that redirects are working properly.

There are a number of reasons why you will need a redirect. Some of the most common are:

• The original URL is invalid
• Introduce an SSL certificate, which makes the site more secure
• The website no longer exists
• You are performing maintenance on the page and want the user to reach a temporary landing page until the necessary changes are made
• You have deleted old pages for products/services that you no longer offer
• You are changing the CMS platform
• You implement a new navigation structure on the site

Setting up a redirect can be done very quickly and easily using You need to find the appropriate .php code, copy it, and then copy it to the appropriate folder on your hosting. This code will use a 301 redirect, which will take the visitor to the new URL, even though they typed in the old URL. That’s the beauty of redirection. If the site is on WordPress , the Yoast tool makes it even easier to set up redirects.

How do redirects affect SEO?

There are different redirects, and they are generally divided into permanent and temporary redirects. Google uses permanent redirects as a strong signal that the target URL should be the one displayed in search results. In contrast, temporary redirects are a weak signal to Google that the URL specified in the redirect should be the one displayed in the search results. Here you can see Google ‘s guidelines for redirects and their impact on SEO.

The most used types of redirection and SEO

The most used redirect types are 301 and 302. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that tells Google bots that the original page has moved to a new location and the original URL no longer exists. This will not only tell search engines that the original page has changed location, but also that the content on that page can be found at the new URL. With a 301 redirect in place, the next time Google crawls your site, it will remove the previous URL from its index and replace it with the new one. 301 is probably the best redirect if you already have to use them on your site. 301 redirects are the most effective redirect method for SEO as you will be able to retain over 90% of the value of the redirected page.

The 302 redirection is much more vulnerable from the SEO aspect and maintaining search positions. It is a temporary redirect used to redirect your site visitors to another page, but only temporarily because you plan to restore the original page later. The view is that 301 and 302 redirects can be treated similarly, but you can never be 100% sure. When used correctly, a 302 redirect will not hurt your SEO efforts.

When you choose this type of redirect, the original page remains indexed in Google and no value (link value) is transferred to the new URL, because Google knows that it is only temporary. This way you will maintain the ranking and authority that page has. Problems usually arise when people don’t know the difference between redirects and choose a 302 to permanently redirect a site. If at all possible, always try to use a 301 redirect.

When redirecting one URL to another, it is crucial to do everything in your power to maintain the SEO value of the original page. We already know that implementing a 301 redirect is the best way when you want to keep the SEO value of a page, because it tells the bots that the page has moved permanently.

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