Does Google really treat 302 & 301 redirects differently?

[seoskunk]

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System: The following 4 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4873996.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 2:13 pm on Nov 3, 2017 (utc -5)

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Found out today that I was sending 302 instead of 301.

There treated the same

[phranque]

there, their, and they're are syntactically different.
301 and 302 are technically different.

[seoskunk]

Its an seo thread so I was answering how Google treated 301 Permanent and 302 Temporary redirects, and they treat them the same. Both carry pagerank the only slight difference is one will show the redirecting url for a while.

I think there is a bit of a misconception out there on 302s being bad for your web sites and being bad for your PageRank... In face, it is definitely not the case.
When we recognize a redirect and we see it is a 302, we assume it is a temporary redirect first and we assume you want the original URL indexed, not the redirected target. In general, that is one thing we like to do there.
However, when we recognize it is actually more like a permanent redirect and 302 is something that you may have accidentally set up, then we do treat that as a 301. We say, instead of indexing the redirected URL we redirection target. John Mueller

Source: [seroundtable.com...]

[phranque]

it doesn't say Google will treat them the same.
what it says is that "we assume it is a temporary redirect first" and "Google may decide that at some point" the "302 is something that you may have accidentally set up".
"we assume first" vs "may decide that at some point you may have accidentally..."
are you feeling lucky?

[goodroi]

So many webmasters have not been correctly using 302 (temporary) vs 301 (permanent) redirects that Google has been treating the different redirects more like they are the same. This does not mean they are the same or that it is wise to be indifferent when selecting which one to use.

To maximize your SEO potential you should pick the appropriate redirect. 301 for permanent or very long term scenarios, tends to give a bigger SEO benefit. 302 for short term stuff like maintenance issues. IMHO it is so easy to pick the right redirect and type in 301 or 302 for your scenario, that it is kinda hard to give a good reason why a webmaster would use the wrong redirect.

I think a bigger debate is how to best code your redirects.

Google usually does not prefer massive redirects to the homepage. They tend to prefer redirecting a widget page to another widget page and sprocket pages to other sprocket pages.

If you are doing a large volume of redirects, you probably want to consider wildcard coding to minimize the size of your htaccess file. Very large htaccess files can hurt the speed of your site and that can indirectly impact rankings & usability.

[seoskunk]

it doesn't say Google will treat them the same.
what it says is that "we assume it is a temporary redirect first" and "Google may decide that at some point" the "302 is something that you may have accidentally set up".
"we assume first" vs "may decide that at some point you may have accidentally..."
are you feeling lucky?

Sighs..... Ok if you don't believe me and don't believe John Mueller, perhaps Gary Illyes will do the trick

“Does it matter what style of redirects sites use, whether it is 301, 302 or 307? Will they all work appropriately in Google’s eyes and will they all pass PageRank?”

Illyes answer was short and succinct. “Don’t worry about it. Just use whatever you want, use whatever makes sense for you.”

[thesempost.com...]

[lucy24]

“Don’t worry about it.”

Well, yeah, but when has G### ever answered any concrete, specific question with “This is absolutely something you should be worried about”?

[phranque]

“Don’t worry about it. Just use whatever you want, use whatever makes sense for you.”

to some people it makes sense to redirect all "not found" urls to the home page, for example, and Google may decide that at some point the soft 404 is something that you may have accidentally set up but i still wouldn't recommend this practice based on gary's loving kindness or john's warmest regards.

[aristotle]

There was a discussion about this issue in another thread recently:

aristotle Wrote:
This is slightly off-topic, but I recently checked an old list of outlinks from a "links page" on one of my sites, in order to update the links to those sites that have recently switched to https.

Checking with Zenu, I discovered that some of them are using 302s instead of 301s to re-direct from http to https.

In other words, whoever implemented the switch to https on those sites used a 302 for the redirect to https.

I don't understand why anyone would do this, unless they thought they might have to revert back to http. The other question is how does google treat this.

Then robzilla wrote:
I've seen that happen with redirects set up by certain control panels, where they default to 302, perhaps to be "safe", so it's probably (and unfortunately) quite common.

I believe Apache also defaults to 302.

The full discussion is in the thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

[lucy24]

That's where you have to remember the truism: Google may be crazy but they’re not stupid. Sure, a 301 and a 302 are supposed to be different, but the evidence of their senses tells them that sometimes they're not.

Similarly a 404 vs. a 410. In each case, the non-default code (301 or 410) has a particular meaning. But it won't occur on all sites, so sometimes you really do have to hypothesize about what the site really meant.

Now, if only That Other Search Engine could grasp that if suchandsuch URL has been returning a 301 or a 410 since 2013, they do not need to keep asking for it several times a month. If it comes back, you'll hear about it.