HTTP Status Code 301: What Is the 301 “Moved Permanently” Redirect?

If you're trying to figure out what a certain status code means and how to fix it, you're in the right place. In this tutorial, we'll do an overview of HTTP status code 500.
Tommy Griffth
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Jun 7, 2023
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3 min. read
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Status Code 301: “Moved Permanently”

HTTP Status Code 301: “Moved Permanently”

Status code 301 is shown when a page has been moved. They are colloquially known as “301 redirects”.

They should be used any time you have permanently replaced a URL with another URL. Users and bots will be permanently moved to the new URL, which will replace the old URL in search engines results. Eventually, the old URL will disappear.

What is critical and probably most important about these redirects is that the link equity has passed from the old URL to the new URL. That means that, if you’ve acquired a bunch of links on an old URL and you 301 redirect that old URL to the new one, you’re going to get all that link equity—and the new URL has the potential to replace the old one in search results.

Sites with bad technical SEO will often have 302 redirects, also known as temporary redirects. These tell search engines that the page is only being moved temporarily, and they should come back and check on it later.

301 redirects play a crucial role in SEO as they maintain search engine rankings during URL changes.

In general, from an SEO perspective, you want to use 301 redirects, and avoid 302 redirects.

The HTTP Protocol

Let’s talk about how the HTTP protocol works.

At its very foundation, the Internet is made up of two core things: clients and servers.

Any time you click on your browser, you are accessing the Internet through a web client. It may be Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer.

When you visit a website, you are making a request to a web server.

Facebook.com, ClickMinded.com, MarthaStewart.com/1525880/marthas-chocolate-chip-cookies, all of these sites have their own home address. It’s called an IP address.

Your home address might be 123 Main Street, New York, NY 10001, and Facebook’s address happens to be 66.220.144.0.

Whenever you visit a page on the web, you are requesting a whole bunch of documents from that website’s server. Maybe those documents are HTML, CSS, images, a PDF—whatever it is, the basic relationship stays the same: you (the client), make a request, and the website (the web server) provides a server response to that request.

The language you are using to make these requests is called the HTTP protocol. These protocols are really just standards that everyone on the web has agreed to. Just like English, Spanish and Chinese are all languages that have an understood protocol, HTTP is just a bunch of standards and an understood protocol.

There are a number of different web protocols out there – and you might be familiar with some of them:

  • DNS – Domain Name System
  • FTP – File Transfer Protocol
  • HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol
  • IRC – Internet Relay Chat Protocol
  • SMTP – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
  • SSL – Secure Sockets Layer

HTTP Status Codes

Now that we understand what the HTTP protocol is, let’s talk about HTTP status codes. Status codes let us know whether the HTTP request was a success, a failure, or something in between.

Let’s take a look at the five core status codes:

  1. 1xx block: informational requests
  2. 2xx block: successful requests
  3. 3xx block: redirects
  4. 4xx block: client errors
  5. 5xx block: server errors

Some status codes are more common than others. For example, when you’re doing digital marketing, you’ll often come across status code 200, status code 301 and status code 404 – but you may never see status code 206 or 307.

Let’s briefly go over each status code block and what they mean.

1xx Status Codes

These are informational requests. The server hasn’t fully completed the request yet and it’s still processing the information. You will not see these codes often. They include:

  • 100 – Continue
  • 101 – Switching protocol
  • 103 – Checkpoints

2xx Status Codes

These are successful requests, which means everything is okay. They include:

  • 200 – OK (you will see this one the most)
  • 201 – Created
  • 202 – Accepted
  • 205 – Reset Content
  • 206 – Partial Content

3xx Status Codes

These are redirects. These are shown when you request an address, but you are sent somewhere else. These can be good or bad. They include:

  • 301 – Moved Permanently
  • 302 – Found
  • 304 – Not Modified
  • 305 – Use Proxy
  • 307 – Temporary Redirect

4xx Status Codes

These are client errors. That means something went wrong with the request (client/user) and not the response (website/ web server). They include:

  • 400 – Bad Request
  • 401 – Unauthorized
  • 403 – Forbidden
  • 404 – Not Found
  • 408 – Request Timeout
  • 410 – Gone
  • 429 – Too Many Requests

5xx Status Codes

These are server errors. That means something went wrong with the response (website/server) and not the request (client/user). They include:

  • 500 – Internal Server Error
  • 502 – Bad Gateway
  • 503 – Service Unavailable
  • 504 – Gateway Timeout

In Conclusion

Looking for more on a particular status code? We have a series of short guides on every HTTP response, so you can optimize your digital marketing strategy. Grab them here:

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