301 redirect: when you need it and how not to break your website
LightSEO · Technical SEO
301 redirect: when you need it and how not to break your website
A redirect is a way to move both the visitor and the accumulated weight of a page to a new address. Without it, any change of structure means lost traffic.
302
temporary – rarely needed
0
chains longer than one step
When you need it
Typical situations
Catalog structure change. Every old address leads to the closest new one in content.
Moving to a new domain. Page-by-page redirects instead of sending the whole site to the home page.
Merging duplicates. Two similar pages are combined into one, and the second redirects to the first.
Deleted product with a replacement. A redirect to a similar product keeps the traffic that came to the old product page.
Mistakes
What breaks redirects
🏠
Everything to the home page
The most common and most harmful mistake: the search engine treats it as a soft 404.
🔗
Long chains
A → B → C → D. Part of the weight is lost at every step, and the crawler may abandon the crawl.
♾
Loops
A leads to B, B back to A. The page becomes completely inaccessible.
Order of work
How to do it right
Start with a mapping table. An "old address → new address" table drawn up before implementation, never after.
Update internal links. Menus and texts should lead straight to the new addresses, with no intermediate redirect.
Monitor for two weeks. Search Console will show addresses with errors and unnecessary hops.
Planning to change URLs or move your site?
We'll draw up a redirect map and carry out the changes without losing rankings or traffic.
