Redirects explained: 301 vs 302 and the difference between moving and being away

A redirect states intent: the permanent kind files the divorce from the old address, the temporary kind books a holiday, and mixing them leaves a site apologizing forever.

A page has lived at one address for years, the move comes, and someone types the old address out of habit. What happens next is a redirect: the server answers, this no longer lives here, go there. It looks like a courtesy, and it is one, but underneath the courtesy sits a declaration the site makes to everything that visits, links, and crawls: a statement about whether the move is real.

There are two kinds because there are two intents. The permanent kind (what the industry calls a 301) says the move is real: the old address is retired, and whatever the page earned in links and in standing should travel with it to the new one. The temporary kind (a 302) says the page is away, not gone: keep the old address alive, because the page intends to come back to it. The seasonal closure and the divorce are different events, and the web keeps a different word for each.

The honest framing is that you are writing intent, and the code must match the sentence you mean. Use the temporary kind for a permanent move and the site spends years quietly apologizing: the old addresses keep ranking beside the new ones, split the credit between them, and keep everyone guessing which one is home. The move happened. The paperwork never said so.

Three failures account for most of the pain. The migration done entirely with temporary redirects, discovered years later when the old addresses still surface beside the new ones and nobody remembers why. The redirect chain, where one address hops through three stops before arriving, and every hop is a small tax paid in speed and in trust. And the deleted page pointed at the home page, which is the web equivalent of returning a letter to the post office: the visitor asked one question and was handed a lobby.

The practice: permanent moves get permanent redirects, aimed directly at the closest living page, not at the lobby. Temporary absences, a seasonal page or a pause for maintenance, get temporary ones, so the return is clean when the page comes back. And after any change, walk the important addresses and read the path: a well-built redirect is one hop, from where the visitor aimed to where the answer lives.

We treat redirects as part of a site's honesty, the same ledger as a corrected address on a shop door. Guidance, not guarantees: how any particular search engine weighs each kind, and what your server or platform makes easy or awkward, belong to the documentation of the tool in your hands and to whoever audits the migration with you. Say what you mean. One hop. Then let the old addresses rest.