What is 301 Redirect?
A permanent redirect passing most ranking signals to the target URL. Use it for migrations, consolidation, and retired pages with a live equivalent.
Related terms
302 Redirect
A temporary redirect that keeps ranking signals with the source URL. Correct for short-term moves (maintenance, tests) but a common cause of signal-splitting when left permanent.
Redirect Chain
Two or more redirects in sequence before the final URL. Chains waste crawl budget, slow users, and dilute signals; audits should flatten them to a single hop.
Canonical Tag
A hint (rel="canonical") naming the preferred URL when duplicates exist. Only about three in five pages web-wide carry a valid one, so validation must cover target quality and conflicting signals.
Technical SEO
The crawling, indexing, rendering, and performance work that lets search engines reach, understand, and serve your pages. It covers directives, architecture, speed, and structured data rather than words on the page.
Crawling
How search-engine bots discover pages by following links, sitemaps, and directives. If a URL is never crawled, it cannot be indexed no matter how good its content is.
Crawl Budget
The number of pages a search engine will crawl on a site in a given period, driven by server capacity and demand signals. Large or slow sites must spend it on indexable, valuable URLs.