How to Fix Temporary Redirects
How to Fix Temporary Redirects Looking at pages with temporary redirects, there are two types of redirects that can be used: Permanent redirects and Temporary redirects.
There are actually a few more but those are by far the most common. Permanent redirects are often called 301 redirects and temporary redirects are called 302 redirects.
And that’s just the code that’s used to create those redirects. Temporary redirects are really very rare. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a legitimate reason to have one because they’re usually only in place for a very short amount of time as the name would suggest.
You only want to use them when you may be on the web or maybe a page of your website is down and you’re fixing it.
And while that’s happening, you want to redirect people who try to get to that page somewhere else so that they don’t see an error message. You can also use them if you’re launching a new page and you’re replacing pages one way or another.
You’re probably making some changes and you just want to do a temporary redirect. Now once you do that, you don’t want to leave a temporary redirect in place.
Obviously, you want to remove it or if you want it to remain for the long term, you should convert it to a 301 permanent redirect.
You can check out our tutorial on how to create those redirects in the link below.
If you run an SEO audit and you see pages with a temporary redirect, they are most likely all emanating from a single redirect. It’s just linked to different pages of the website.
If you’re looking at the details page, you’ll see in the first column the page where this link occurs, the second column where that link is going, the first URL and then the next column where then that link is redirected and then the status code, which will be 302s since we’re looking at temporary redirects.
So the first thing we want to do is to go to this page in question. For the purpose of this tutorial, I used a redirect plugin which I rarely recommend using. The details about that are in the video “How to Create Redirects”.
But if you see down here, I have a list of redirects. One of them is a 302 redirect. It goes from the commercial services page to a structured wiring page.
If you’re using a plugin like this and see a temporary redirect, then you’d just want to see if it’s a redirect that you want to keep or if you want to edit it and change that to a 301. Most likely, for a lot of plugins, the only options will be 301 and 302.
So in this case, we would change it to 301, save that, and then we can go back to SEMrush, and we run the audit.
That should take care of all those temporary redirects since they were all originating from this one link.