Let’s cover some myths and misconceptions by answering common questions about redirection.
Q: Can I now 301 redirect everything without risk of losing traffic?
A: No
All redirects carry risk.
While it’s super awesome that Google is no longer “penalizing” 301 redirects through loss of PageRank, keep in mind that PageRank is only one signal out of hundreds that Google uses to rank pages.
Ideally, if you 301 redirect a page to an exact copy of that page, and the only thing that changes is the URL, then in theory you may expect no traffic loss with these new guidelines.
That said, the more moving parts you introduce, the more things start to get hairy. Don’t expect your redirects to non-relevant pages to carry much, if any, weight. Redirecting your popular Taylor Swift fan page to your affiliate marketing page selling protein powder is likely dead in the water.
In fact, Glenn Gabe recently uncovered evidence that Google treats redirects to irrelevant pages as soft 404s. In other words, it’s a redirect that loses both link equity and relevance.
See: How to Completely Ruin (or Save) Your Website With Redirects
Q: Is it perfectly safe to use 302 for everything instead of 301s?
A: Again, no
A while back we heard that the reason Google started treating 302 (temporary) redirects like 301s (permanent) is that so many websites were implementing the wrong type (302s when they meant 301s), that it caused havoc on how Google ranked pages.
The problem is that while we now know that Google passes PageRank though 302s, we still have a few issues. Namely:
- We don’t know if 301s and 302s are equal in every way. In the past, we’ve seen 302s eventually pass PageRank, but only after considerable time has passed. In contrast to 301s that pass link signals fairly quickly, we don’t yet know how 302s are handled in this manner.
- 302 is a web standard, and Google isn’t the only player on the block. 302s are meant to indicate a temporary redirect, and it’s quite possible that other search engines (Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo) and social services (Facebook, Twitter, etc) treat 302s differently than Google.
Rand Fishkin summed it up nicely.
