Compounding depends on URLs surviving. A post that earns links for three years and then changes address without a redirect has spent those three years building an asset it then discards. This page sets out which redirect to use and when.
The four codes that matter
| Code | Meaning | Method preserved | Use for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 301 | Moved Permanently | No. May rewrite POST to GET | Permanent moves of pages you want indexed at the new address |
| 302 | Found, temporary | No. May rewrite POST to GET | Genuinely temporary redirection |
| 307 | Temporary Redirect | Yes | Temporary redirection where the method must not change |
| 308 | Permanent Redirect | Yes | Permanent moves where the method must not change |
Why 301 and 308 both exist
301 and 302 predate any requirement to preserve the HTTP method. In practice, clients routinely converted a POST into a GET when following them. 307 and 308 were specified to remove that ambiguity: they preserve the original method.
For a publisher moving article URLs, the requests are GETs, so 301 and 308 behave the same way. 301 remains the conventional choice and is the most widely understood by tooling.
The rules that matter in practice
Redirect to the equivalent page, not the home page. Mass-redirecting a retired archive to the root is treated as a soft error rather than a move, and the accumulated value of those URLs is lost.
Avoid chains. Each hop adds latency and risks a break. If URL A moved to B and B later moved to C, update A to point at C directly.
Keep redirects in place indefinitely. There is no point at which old links stop existing. Removing a redirect after a year discards whatever still points at the old address.
A redirect is not a canonical tag. A redirect moves people and machines to a different URL. A canonical tag tells machines which of several reachable URLs is authoritative while leaving all of them reachable. They solve different problems and are not interchangeable.
How this is scored
URL stability sits inside Compounding. A publisher who has changed platform without a redirect map, or whose archive returns 404 for links that still exist elsewhere, has an archive that does not accumulate regardless of how good the writing is.
Sources
Verified August 2026.