How Are Redirects Like 301, 302, 307, And Others Being Handled?

Redirects have always been a gray area and a lot of us have been thinking about how they are handled by Google. A month ago John Mueller from Google promised some more information as he was going to dig deeper into the topic.

How Google handles 302 redirects, especially, raised a debate among the SEO society and answers to that debate were posted on Google+ by John a couple of weeks ago. I think we can trust him when he says that despite the confusing signals, after a 302 redirect the page will rank on Google just fine.

In a more detailed way John Mueller explained:

In general, a redirect is between two pages, here called R & S (it also works for pages like https://example.com/filename.asp , or pretty much any URL). Very simplified, when you call up page R, it tells you that the content is at S, and when it comes to browsers, they show the content of S right away.

From his post we also understood what some other redirects mean. 301 is a permanent redirect, 302 is a temporary redirect which means that it may change in the future depending on who is accessing it, what is the device used or the location.

As for 307 redirects, they are just some kind of browser trolling since 307 means that you try to access a HTTP version in your browser, but get automatically sent to the HTTPS version.