What Is a 301 Redirect? The Moving-Day Guide for URLs

Jul 30, 2026 · SEO Glossary

When my family moved house years ago, my mother filled out a mail-forwarding form at the post office. For the next year, every letter addressed to the old place landed in our new mailbox. Nobody lost touch with us. That form is exactly what a 301 redirect does for a web page.

So what is a 301 redirect, in technical terms? It's an HTTP status code your server sends when someone requests a URL that has permanently moved. Instead of showing an error, the server replies: "This page now lives at a new address — go there." Browsers follow it instantly, and search engines update their records so the new URL inherits the old one's rankings.

What is a 301 redirect actually doing behind the scenes?

Every time a browser asks a server for a page, the server answers with a three-digit status code. A 200 means "here's the page." A 404 means "never heard of it." A 301 means "moved permanently" and includes a Location header pointing to the new URL. The browser then makes a second request to that new address, usually so fast you never notice.

Search engines treat that signal seriously. When Googlebot hits a 301, it eventually drops the old URL from its index and transfers the accumulated link equity — the ranking value earned from backlinks — to the new one. Google has confirmed that 301s pass full PageRank, which wasn't always believed to be true. In practice, if your old page ranked #4 for a decent keyword, a clean 301 usually keeps you in that neighborhood after a short settling period of days to a few weeks.

When a 301 is the right tool

• You changed a URL. Renamed /services.html to /web-design-services/? Redirect the old one.
• You moved domains. Rebranding from joesdesign.com to joestudio.com means 301ing every page to its counterpart — page to page, not everything to the homepage.
• You switched to HTTPS. Every http:// URL should 301 to its https:// twin.
• You're consolidating duplicates. If example.com and www.example.com both load, pick one and 301 the other.
• You deleted a page that had a close replacement. An old "2019 pricing" page can redirect to your current pricing page.

That last point has a catch: only redirect to a genuinely relevant page. Google treats a redirect from a deleted blog post to your homepage as a soft 404 — it ignores the redirect and treats the page as gone anyway. If there's no close match, an honest 404 error is the better choice.

301 vs. the other redirect codes

The one to remember: 301 means forever, 302 means I'll be back. If you're not sure which you have, the HTTP 301 status code guide goes deeper, and I've written separately about what a 302 redirect is for.

How to set one up

Where you configure a 301 depends on your stack:

• Apache: in .htaccess — Redirect 301 /old-page/ https://example.com/new-page/
• Nginx: in your server block — return 301 https://example.com/new-page/; inside a matching location
• WordPress: plugins like Redirection or the redirect manager built into most SEO plugins. No code needed.
• Shopify / Wix / Squarespace: each has a built-in URL redirect panel.
• Cloudflare: Bulk Redirects handle thousands of mappings at the edge, which is handy for domain migrations.

After setting one up, test it. Run curl -I https://example.com/old-page/ in a terminal and confirm you see HTTP/2 301 with the right Location. Browsers cache 301s aggressively, so a mistyped destination can haunt returning visitors even after you fix it — always verify with curl or a fresh incognito window.

Redirect chains: the silent speed killer

Here's the mistake I see on almost every site older than five years. Page A was redirected to B in 2019. Then B was redirected to C in 2022. Then the site moved to HTTPS, adding another hop. Now a visitor clicking an old link bounces through three or four redirects before seeing content, each hop adding 100–300ms on a decent connection and more on mobile.

Google says it follows up to ten hops, but link equity and crawl efficiency degrade along the way, and users feel every hop. The fix is simple: point every old URL directly at the final destination. A redirects to C. B redirects to C. No stepping stones. A crawl-based audit will map your chains for you — you can crawl your site and get a list of every chain and loop in a few minutes.

Three more mistakes worth avoiding

1. Using a 302 for a permanent move. Google often figures out your intent and treats a long-lived 302 as a 301, but "often" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Send the accurate signal.
2. Forgetting internal links. A 301 rescues external links you can't control. Your own menus, footers, and in-content links you can control — update them to point straight at the new URL so users and crawlers skip the redirect entirely.
3. Removing redirects too soon. Keep migration redirects in place for at least a year; Google recommends the same. Old backlinks, bookmarks, and printed materials keep sending traffic far longer than you'd expect.

A 301 redirect is one of the few SEO tools that's genuinely set-and-forget — as long as you set it correctly the first time. Move the page, forward the mail, update your own links, and check for chains once or twice a year. That's the whole discipline.