All my redirects are giving me a nice 301. Except the "http://www", for some reason it results in 302. I think I tried all the combinations already

Question

I wanted to ask you for your help. I found this answer that is recommended on the internet - Forward naked domain with URL path for my Google Domain but it seems that it is already outdated.

I tried a lot of things, I was using NakedSSL, wwwizard and I even transfered my domain from my local provider to google domains. No matter what I do, I am not able to set all 3 possibilites to nice 301 redirect (and one 200). This is my best result currently:

Structure	Redirect
https://example.com	301
https://www.example.com	200 (my preffered format)
http://example.com	301
http://www.example.com	302

Here is my current setup:

1. I added to DNS record www | CNAME | my_server_address
2. I added google forwarding from example.com to https://www.example.com with 301 | Forwarding Path | SSL On

The thing is, I have no idea how to force http://www.example.com to also give me a 301. I am also not sure which entry controls this http://www. I tried adding it second times to DNS, I tried adding it as the additional record in google forwarding but either the google domains system complains about structure and doesn't let me save it or it simply is not doing anything.

Could someone please point me in the right direction?

#EDIT:

My domain provider is now Google Domains

My hosting provider is PythonAnywhere (therefore I am given only CNAME (without A tag) and I don't have access to nginx). I am also using free SSL certificate and have option force HTTPS turned on.

Answer 1

PythonAnywhere's "Force HTTPS" feature is evidentially is implemented with a 302 redirect. You have three options:

1. Don't worry about it. A 301 redirect is the gold standard for SEO, but unless your site has tons of old historical links to http:// pages, it is very unlikely that you are getting any SEO value from that redirect. In any case search engines understand 302 redirects well enough.

2. Contact their customer support and beg them to change that feature to use a 301 redirect instead of a 302 redirect.

3. Disable the "Force HTTPS" feature and implement the redirects yourself. You should be able to put redirect code into Python. It should check that the current URL doesn't have HTTPS and issue a 301 redirect to your preferred URL. You would normally check environment variables or headers like SERVER_PORT==80; or HTTPS!=on; or if you are using a CDN or load balancer,X-Forwarded-Proto!=https.