The Wrong Advices

Checking redirects isn’t simply a matter of seeing if you land on the right page. To be safe, you should check the HTTP header and make sure that it returns a 301 Moved Permanently status code. If you aren’t getting a 301 code then there is either something wrong with the redirect, or you’ve chosen the wrong type of redirect.

301 redirects are the preferred method because they are search engine friendly and will pass on link juice.

The best online solution I’ve found for checking redirects is the Server Headers Tool from SEO Consultants. There are plenty of similar tools out there but this one returns more detailed results than the other ones I’ve tried. If you look at the picture at the beginning of this post you will see an example of how a 301 redirect should look when using this tool.

I’ve been playing around with this tool lately not because I’ve changed anything with my site but rather I wanted to see if services like tinyurl and urltea use 301 redirects. If you are similarly curious I can tell you that tinyurl does a 301 and urltea does a 307, which is a temporary redirect. Thumbs up for tinyurl, thumbs down for urltea.