301 redirect: keep your Google ranking

A 301 redirect is a technical instruction that automatically sends a visitor and Google from an old page address to a new one, telling them the move is permanent. It matters most when you redesign your site, change your domain name, or switch your site to HTTPS, because it passes the reputation the old address patiently built on Google to the new one. Without it, your old addresses return an error, and you lose in one go the rankings and traffic you spent years earning. Done properly, it makes the change completely invisible to your customers and to search engines alike.

This guide is written for business owners, shopkeepers, tradespeople, and freelancers who are about to touch their website and have a legitimate fear of losing their spot on Google in the process. I’ll explain in plain words what a 301 redirect really is, when it becomes essential, how to set one up depending on your site, how long to keep it, and the mistakes that cost the most. You don’t need to be technical to follow this, only to know what to discuss with whoever looks after your site.

What is a 301 redirect, in plain terms?

A 301 redirect is a forwarding sign placed at a page’s old address, telling everyone, visitors and Google alike, that the content now lives at a new address and that this is permanent. The visitor sees nothing: they click the old link and land straight on the new page, with no error page and no bad surprise.

The name comes from the language servers and browsers use with each other. When you ask for a page, the server answers with a small numbered code: 200 when everything is fine, 404 when the page can’t be found, and 301 when the page has moved for good. That 301 is the message Google waits for to understand it should replace the old address with the new one in its results, instead of simply showing an error in its place. It’s an invisible detail, but it’s the one that decides whether your change of address strengthens your ranking or breaks it.

You have to separate a redirect from simply deleting a page. If you erase an address and put nothing in its place, the people who bookmarked that link, and the other sites that cited you, hit an error. If you set up a 301 redirect, that same link keeps working and takes the person to the right spot. The redirect is what makes the difference between moving out and leaving a forwarding address, and moving out and vanishing overnight.

301, 302, or a canonical tag: which one do you need?

The right answer comes down to one question: is the change of address permanent or temporary? A 301 redirect tells Google it’s permanent, so it shows the new page and transfers the old one’s reputation. A 302 redirect says it’s temporary, so Google keeps the old address in mind and keeps showing it. Pick the wrong code and you either lose your reputation by accident or stop a real change from being registered.

Google’s own documentation is clear on this. For a permanent redirect like the 301, Google explains that it follows the redirect and uses it as a signal to choose the new address as the reference version to display. For a temporary redirect like the 302, it also follows the redirect, but it doesn’t use it to change the reference version, so the old page stays in the results. In other words, only the 301 truly moves your page in Google’s eyes.

There’s a third tool people often confuse with a redirect, the canonical tag. It doesn’t move anyone and it doesn’t change any address. It’s used when two different addresses show almost the same page, to tell Google which one is the official version to keep. Here’s how to choose without slipping up, depending on your situation.

In the life of a real business site, the temporary case is rare. A sales campaign that runs for three weeks, a page under maintenance: those are about the only moments a 302 makes sense. For everything else, a redesign, a domain change, a page merged into another, you want a 301 redirect.

What effect does a 301 redirect have on your Google ranking?

A 301 redirect passes to the new address the reputation the old one earned, meaning its rankings, the trust it built, and the links other sites pointed at it. That’s exactly what lets you change an address without starting from zero on Google. The one condition is that the new page genuinely covers the same subject as the old one.

For a long time, a stubborn belief held that a redirect lost a little reputation on the way, like a moving tax. Gary Illyes at Google put an end to that idea back in 2016, stating that a permanent redirect no longer loses any reputation. The new page inherits what the old one built, with nothing skimmed off. That’s one more reason to always choose the 301 rather than letting a page die on an error.

One factor remains that nobody can remove, and that one is time. Google doesn’t recrawl all your addresses the day after your change, it goes back over them gradually, across several weeks. During that window, your rankings may move a little while the new address takes the old one’s place in the index. That’s normal, it settles down, and it has nothing to do with a penalty. The way to get through this period is to leave it alone rather than tweaking it every week, and let Google finish updating. If you want the broader picture of how Google sorts sites, our article on how to rank your website on Google covers the basics.

When do you actually need a 301 redirect?

You need a 301 redirect every time an address that existed, and that Google or your visitors knew, stops existing at that exact spot. Four situations come up constantly in businesses, and they’re precisely the ones where your ranking is on the line.

The first, and the most common, is the redesign. When you rebuild your site, the way pages are organised almost always changes, and the addresses with it: your “our-services” page becomes “offerings”, your articles move around. Each of these old addresses has to point to the new page that replaces it, otherwise Google ends up with dozens of pages it can’t find and your traffic drops. This is at the heart of a successful website redesign, and the reason a well run redesign strengthens your ranking instead of weakening it.

The second is the domain name change. You move from “mybusiness-lyon.com” to “mybusiness.com” because you’ve grown or changed your name: your whole old address has to redirect to the new one, page by page, to carry your reputation with you. This is directly tied to managing your domain name and hosting, which is best sorted out before you start.

The third is the switch to HTTPS, the little padlock that marks a secure site. Technically, the “http” version of each page becomes an “https” version, and those are two different addresses to Google. Without a redirect from one to the other, you end up with two versions of your site competing. This follows naturally from installing an SSL certificate. The fourth situation, more occasional, is deleting or merging pages: when you combine two articles into one, or drop an offer, the old address should be redirected to the page closest in subject, rather than leaving a 404 error in its place.

How do you set up a 301 redirect?

A 301 redirect is set up in one of three places depending on how your site is built, and the principle stays the same everywhere: each old address points to the new page that truly matches it. You don’t necessarily have to do it yourself, but knowing where it happens helps you talk to the right person.

The simplest route, when your web host offers it, is their control panel: you’ll often find a dedicated section where you paste the old address on one side and the new one on the other, without touching a single technical line. On a WordPress site, you usually go through a plugin made for this, such as Redirection, Rank Math, or Yoast, which gives you the same principle inside the dashboard and, on top of that, keeps the list of all your redirects in one place. Both of these routes suit the vast majority of business sites.

The third route is more technical and applies to sites hosted on an Apache server, which is very common. The instruction is written in a hidden file called .htaccess, and a redirect fits on a single line there. In practice, it looks like this:

Redirect 301 /old-page /new-page

That line tells the server: when someone asks for “old-page”, send them permanently to “new-page”. It works, but a typo in this file can make the whole site unreachable, so it’s the kind of change you hand to your developer. On a custom coded site, the logic sits directly in the site’s code, and it’s something we handle from end to end when a site goes live, precisely so you never have to touch that file. Whichever route you take, keep the golden rule in mind: one old page, one matching new page, never everything sent to the same destination.

How long should you keep a 301 redirect?

Keep a 301 redirect in place for at least a year, and ideally forever. That’s Google’s recommendation, voiced by John Mueller: below a year, Google may not have recrawled your old address often enough to understand the move is permanent and fully transfer your signals to the new page.

There’s a second, more human reason not to be in a hurry to remove a redirect: people hold on to your old addresses for a long time. A customer bookmarked your page two years ago, another site cited you in an article it will never update, a directory still points to the old version. As long as the redirect exists, all those visitors land in the right place. The day you cut it, they hit an error, and you lose both those visitors and the reputation those links kept sending you.

In practice, the healthiest approach is to treat a 301 redirect as permanent. It doesn’t slow your site down, it costs nothing to leave in place, and it protects traffic you can’t always see in your statistics. The only useful upkeep is to keep a record of your redirects somewhere, so you know what was moved and why the day you change your site again.

How do you check a 301 redirect, and what mistakes should you avoid?

To check that a 301 redirect works, open the old address in your browser and see whether you land on the new page, then confirm with a tool that the returned code really is 301 and not 302. Free online checkers like httpstatus.io or a redirect checker show that code in a second, and Google’s Search Console URL inspection tool tells you how it sees each address on your site.

The costliest mistake, and the most common, is redirecting all your old pages to the homepage. It comes from a good intention, avoiding errors, but Google reads a redirect to an unrelated page as a fake missing page, and then strips you of the reputation of each of those old addresses. The right method is the well known one to one: each old page to the new page that covers the same subject, and only the truly orphaned pages to a nearby section.

Two other traps come up often on a redesign, and both are technical. The first is chaining redirects: an address A that points to B, which points to C. Each hop wastes time and dilutes the signal, so always redirect A straight to the final destination. The second is forgetting pages along the way, especially during a big redesign: the only reliable safeguard is to list all your existing addresses before you start, then tick each one off once its redirect is set and checked. A site check after go live helps you spot the addresses that slipped through the net.

Rebuilding your site without losing your Google ranking

A 301 redirect is nothing reserved for technicians. It’s the thread that ties the old version of your site to the new one and carries your ranking along with it. Thought through, page by page, it turns a risky change, a redesign or a domain name change, into an operation neither your customers nor Google notice. Done badly, or left out, it wipes years of hard won rankings in a few weeks.

This is exactly what I handle from end to end when I build or rebuild a site: the full list of old addresses, the one to one mapping to the new ones, the check that each redirect returns the right code, and the ranking follow up in the weeks after go live. If you’re preparing a redesign or a domain change and want it done without an air pocket on Google, take a look at the two monthly plans and let’s talk about your project.