What redirection should I use whether I am not sure it is temporary or permanent?

Question

I know that 301 redirection for permanent redirection. 302 for temporary redirects.

I want to redirect author pages to BuddyPress profile pages in WordPress.

I am not sure that it will be permanent. I might cancel redirection after one month, two month or may be after one year or may be redirection will be permanents. It depends on my future plan as well as what my website readers suggest.

So what redirection should I use whether I am not sure it is temporary or permanent?

Answer 1

• As you already know 301 is permanent redirection and 302 temporary redirection.

• Now comparing both of these 301 in most cases is important for indexing in search engines as their crawlers take this in account and transfer Page rank when using 301.

• However if your redirection is for short period of time or you plan to reverse it in future the main issue with 301 redirect is that browser will cache the redirection even if you disabled the redirection from the server level. It is always better to use 302 redirect if you are enabling the redirection for a short period of time.

With that being said you want to experiment for sometime whether you like the results of redirection or not. In that case I would suggest going for temporary redirect for the experimental time period (a couple of days) and then change it to permanent redirect if you are happy with the results.