Redirect (Umleitung)

What Is a Redirect?

Incorrect or missing redirects are one of the most common reasons for ranking losses after a website relaunch. Without careful redirect mapping, years of accumulated backlinks and rankings are lost. Before every relaunch, plan a complete mapping of all old URLs to the new ones and then monitor in Search Console whether all redirects are working correctly.

A redirect is an automatic forwarding from one URL to another. The most important redirect types are: 301 (Permanently Moved — for permanent moves), 302 (Temporary Redirect — for temporary redirects), and 307 (Temporary Redirect with POST data). Redirects are essential during website relaunches, domain migrations, URL structure changes, or for broken pages. A 301 redirect forwards both search engines and users to the new URL and transfers a large portion of the old URL’s ranking power to the new one.

Technically, Googlebot interprets a 301 redirect as a signal that the old page has been permanently moved and the new page is its successor. The majority of ranking signals (around 90–95%) are passed on — not 100%, as Google interprets the redirect as a quality indicator. A 302 redirect is handled differently by Google: it signals temporariness and does not pass ranking power. Redirect chains (multiple consecutive redirects) are problematic: a chain of 301→301→301 wastes crawl resources and can damage rankings. One or at most two redirects are acceptable; after that, link directly to the target URL.

In practice, redirects should be planned carefully. Before a relaunch, a complete mapping of all old URLs to new URLs should be done. A CSV file documents: old URL → new URL → redirect type. Server-based 301 redirects (in .htaccess or server config) are better than JavaScript redirects because Googlebot follows them more reliably. After redirecting, monitor in Google Search Console whether old URLs are still being crawled — if so, redirects may need correction or missing pages may need to be added. Old redirects should be removed after 6–12 months to avoid wasting crawl budget unnecessarily.