301, 302, 303 and 307 redirects

As we have several threads on redirects and have redirects on the mind...I thought I would ask the next relevant question. Does Google handle 301, 302, 303 and 307 redirects differently?

301 is called permanent redirect, the other three are called temporary redirects.

BTW, Frontpage stomps on the .htaccess file...so you can't use the .htaccess method of redirects for clients that use frontpage publishing.

Most programming languages give you a way to perform a redirect. For example you can do a redirect with PHP by calling Header("Location: www.seochat.com");

PHP does a 302 redirect by default...you can change it to a 301 with the code:



If you have individual files that need to be redirected...I think it is better to do so with file stubs than by adding a bunch of commands to the .htaccess file. But the .htaccess file is better for global redirects.

Any way back to SEO. Does Google handle 301 and 302 differently?

Yes... Google does treat them differently... a 301 can kill off your page rank

It doesn't "kill" the pagerank, it transfers it to the page you permanently redirect to.

Well... I am currently waiting to see this happen with a domain name which I have 301'd onto another... It does seem to be the popular belief that it will transfer but in my case I'm seeing it killed off... maybe there are special circumstances that have come into effect... who knows...

I didn't believe it myself... but there are a few others who share my opinion...

How long ago did you do the redirect? and by what method?

The transfer is not instantaneous.

Oh and i've just noticed this is a 4 year old thread... how do people find these to add a comment in!

Please if you have a question about something then just create a new thread rather than bringing old ones back to life.

There happen to be a large bit of people who also believe in evolution... believing in something doesn't necessarily make it fact.

301 is a permanent, temporary redirects will not work, they can cause issues and ruin your site. 301 redirects must be tested to make sure the headers return correctly or they won't work either.

Also I believe Google is cracking down slightly on these massive redirects... where a whole site is redirected to ONE page on another site... I have seen only a tiny bit of evidence to support this but it seems plausible. If so those practicing this could see a "killing off" of there pagerank

When redirecting try and redirect to relevant pages and not all to the same page.

What about 302 re-direct.

Are they potentially dangerous for pagerank as well?

In my awstat I see about 20% 302's and I do not know where these pages are?

How can I find out and if I should minimise this number and how?

Yes,it is dangerous for PR as well as SERP.
302 means,you are telling the SE that this redirection is temporary and near future you are going to change it.
In this case SE will not transfer any value of your previous URL to the redirected one and if you keep this redirection for a long time,then SE may consider it something unethical.

To be honest I don't have any clear idea about this,so it's better to listen what experts are saying.

If the number of links on your site is sufficiently small, you can test them exhaustively using the SE-friendly redirect checker (search for it).
Otherwise, you should search the source code of your site and the files containing redirect information (such as the .htaccess) file for everything related to redirects. Maybe some instance pops up where the redirect is not specified to be a 301.

E.g.: You find a line like:
header("Location: www. seochat.com");
and the line
header("HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently");
is missing.

I've been sing 307 htaccess redirects during brief periods of high traffic from sites like Digg.com ... but now, even weeks later, Google seems to think my original page is 'spam' and brings up all the sites linking to it BEFORE it for relevant search results. Here's how I'm redirecting in htaccess:

Redirect 307 /source/ h-ttp://site.com/destination

The redirects are only up a few hours to a day at most. Why is Google treating it like I'm spamming or like the redirect is permanent or something?!?! Any advice for other .htaccess redirect command solutions? Ways to notify Google? Thanks!