How to Set Up 301 Redirects and Why They Matter for SEO

A 301 redirect is an instruction that tells browsers and search engines that a URL has permanently moved to a new address. When a visitor or a search engine bot follows the old URL, your server responds with a 301 status code and the new URL, automatically sending them to the correct destination.

Getting redirects right is one of the most important technical SEO tasks during a website migration, a URL restructure, or even the simple deletion of a page. Done correctly, redirects preserve the ranking signals built up by old URLs and ensure visitors never hit a dead end. Done incorrectly — or not done at all — they can cause significant and lasting damage to organic search performance.

When to Use a 301 Redirect

Use a 301 redirect whenever a URL permanently changes. This includes renaming a page slug, restructuring a site's directory hierarchy, merging two pages into one, removing a page and pointing its traffic to a relevant alternative, or switching a domain from HTTP to HTTPS. A 301 redirect on your HTTP version pointing to your HTTPS version is essential — without it, you have two competing versions of your site in Google's index.

Do not use a 301 for temporary changes. A 302 redirect signals a temporary move, telling search engines to keep the original URL in their index because the page will return. If you use a 301 for something that is actually temporary, Google may remove the original URL from its index. If you use a 302 for something permanent, Google may not pass full ranking signals to the new URL.

How to Set Up 301 Redirects

On Apache web servers, 301 redirects are commonly set up in the .htaccess file using the Redirect or RewriteRule directives. A simple redirect from /old-page to /new-page looks like: Redirect 301 /old-page https://example.com/new-page. Nginx uses a return 301 directive in its server configuration. Both approaches are configured at the server level and apply immediately without changing any page content.

For CMS-based sites, plugins handle redirects without server access. WordPress users commonly use Redirection or Yoast SEO Premium, both of which provide a management interface for adding and monitoring redirects. Shopify and Squarespace both include built-in redirect management in their settings. For large migrations involving hundreds of URL changes, prepare a CSV of old and new URLs and use a bulk import feature to set them all up at once.

Avoiding Redirect Chains and Loops

A redirect chain occurs when URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects to URL C. Each additional hop in the chain costs time and — according to Google — may dilute the amount of ranking signal passed along. Best practice is to redirect old URLs directly to the final destination, bypassing any intermediate steps. When building a new set of redirects, check whether any URLs being redirected are themselves the destination of existing redirects.

At Xpose in Norwich we frequently encounter redirect chains when clients have migrated their sites multiple times and accumulated layers of historical redirects. Auditing and flattening these chains — replacing A → B → C with a direct A → C redirect — is a routine part of technical SEO housekeeping. A redirect loop, where URL A redirects to URL B and URL B redirects back to URL A, will return an error to any visitor and should be fixed immediately.