redirect

Redirect is a webserver function that sends a user from one URL to another. Redirects commonly take the form of an automated redirect that uses one of a series of status codes defined within the HTTP protocol.

On a Website, redirection is a technique for moving visitors to a different Web page than the one they request, usually because the page requested is unavailable. Web users often encounter redirection when they visit the Web site of a company whose name has been changed or which has been acquired by another company.

Term used to describe the process of sending a signal, data, or other information to an alternate location. Some examples of redirection are sending data intended for one drive to another drive or sending a user visiting a web page to another web page.

If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, 301 (permanent) redirect is recommended. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page. The 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location.

301 redirects are particularly useful in the following circumstances:

• You've moved your site to a new domain, and you want to make the transition as seamless as possible.
• People access your site through several different URLs. If, for example, your home page can be reached in multiple ways – for instance, http://example.com/home, http://home.example.com, or http://www.example.com – it's a good idea to pick one of those URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination, and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL. You can also use Search Console to set your preferred domain.
• You're merging two websites and want to make sure that links to outdated URLs are redirected to the correct pages.

There is also temporally redirect – 302. A 302 status code means Found, or more commonly referred to as “temporarily moved.” This redirect doesn’t carry or pass the link value to the new location. What it does do is get the user to an appropriate location for you so that you aren’t showing them a broken link, a 404 page not found, or an error page.

You may use 302 redirect when for example in there is the product is seasonal, out of stock, or is something that you might sell again in your online store. In this case, you might want to use a 302 redirect to send the user to the category page. If the product outage is going to be for any real length of time it might not make sense to send the user to a page that they cannot order from, so you redirect them to the category page allowing them to look at similar items. And with that 302 you are telling the search engine crawlers that your content is just offline temporarily and they should keep the value of that page intact and not pass it to another URL.