I talked about using Pretty Links, a free WordPress plugin, recently to pretty up your ugly affiliate links. Not only does it make the affiliate links more attractive, but you can swap out the destination URL of the Pretty Link without having to change the Pretty Link itself, making it very handy and time saving in instances where you need to update your links. But you’ll notice when you create a new link that it offers a few choices in terms of what type of redirect you want to use between 301 vs 302 and 307 redirects. Which leads us to the topic of THIS article, or what’s the difference between 301 vs 302 vs 307 redirects.
301 Vs 302 Vs 307 Redirects
301 Redirect – The 301 is a PERMANENT redirect classification. So you point Page A to your newer Page B using a 301 redirect. This tells search engines who see this that Page A is dead, long live Page B. Remove Page A from the database and instead use Page B in any instances of referring to Page A. And this isn’t going to change, hence the permanent change.
You would use this if you changed your permalink structure, for example. So if you changed the title of a page or post to be more search engine friendly perhaps, you certainly don’t want that page’s content associated with the old, non optimized URL. You want that content associated with the new URL. This is where you’re using a permanent 301 redirect.
302 Redirect – The 302 redirect is a sort of temporary redirect and is a bit antiquated. It basically says that the content has been found at the new redirected URL, but this isn’t the permanent URL and doesn’t give any additional information. Not especially helpful for search engines trying to make sense of your redirects and links.
307 Redirect – The 307 is in many ways an improved version of the 302. The 307 redirect states that the redirected location is valid at the moment, but it could change. A 307 redirect is, by definition, a temporary redirect.
As I covered in my post on what redirect should I use on affiliate links, the 307 redirect is ideal to use when making affiliate links in Pretty Links because this designates that the redirected to URL may change in the future. This is often the case with affiliate links which are subject to change either in terms of the recommended product or simply an update to the linking structure on the product’s end.
With all of this in mind, it’s recommended that you use the 301 redirect for permanent moves like the above mentioned case and the 307 redirect when dealing with affiliate links (for example) or any instance where you’re serving up temporary content in place of the originally linked to URL but intend on returning to it in the future.