Redirects are simple individually and cause most of their damage in aggregate. One redirect is a routing instruction; a few thousand accumulated over years is an architecture, and usually one nobody designed.
What a redirect is for
A redirect preserves the value of an address that no longer serves content. It tells search engines and browsers where that content went, so links pointing at the old address still arrive somewhere useful.
Two things determine whether that works: choosing the right type, and pointing at the right destination.
The rules that matter
- Permanent means permanent. Use a 301 when content has moved for good. A temporary redirect signals the old URL will return, so signals are not consolidated the same way.
- Redirect to the equivalent page, not to the homepage. Bulk redirects to the homepage are treated as soft 404s and preserve almost nothing.
- Never chain. When A points to B and B points to C, update A to point at C directly.
- Some pages should not redirect at all. Content that is genuinely gone with no equivalent should return a proper error status rather than being pointed somewhere irrelevant.
The third rule is the one that degrades quietly. Chains form naturally as sites change over years, and each additional hop adds latency and loses a little more.
Guides in this section
- 301 vs 302 redirects — when each is correct and what choosing wrong costs.
- Redirect chains — how they form and how to flatten them.
- Redirect loops — diagnosing pages that never resolve.
- 404 vs 410 — when a page should simply be gone.
- Soft 404s — pages that return success but behave as missing.
Where redirects matter most
Migrations. A domain change, replatform or restructure lives or dies on the completeness and accuracy of its redirect map, and it is the one occasion where redirects are created in bulk rather than one at a time.
See SEO migration and changing domain without losing SEO.
Auditing what you already have
Most established sites carry redirects nobody remembers creating. Worth checking periodically: chains longer than one hop, redirects pointing at pages that now 404, loops, and internal links still pointing at redirected URLs rather than final destinations.
That last one is common and easy to fix. Internal links should point at the destination directly — routing your own navigation through redirects is waste you control entirely.
For a review of redirect handling across your site, book an SEO consultation.