Temporarily redirecting a small website to a specific url of another website

[Mat_C]

Hi,

I would like to redirect a small website that contains info about a specific project temporarily to a specific url about this project on my main website.

Reason for this is that the small website doesn't contain accurate info anymore. We will adapt the content in the next few weeks and then remove the redirect again.

Should I set up a 301 or a 302?

Thanks

[Andrew-SEO]

Then when the small website has new information. Remove the 302 and resubmit your sitemap to search console and manually fetch and index the home page with all linked pages.

[Mat_C]

Thanks for the answer.

I know the 302 is the standard for a temporary redirect, but the reason I ask this question is that I came across a lot of articles that mention that 302's shouldn't be used, unless for testing a page for example.

Since http 1.1, the 307 redirect is used and this could be another option for a temporary redirect.

Any thoughts on this?

[effectdigital]

This all comes down to the fact that, technically 302 has always been 'found', but there was no status code for a temporary redirect so Google advised people to use 302 (as no one really ever used it for its intended purpose)

Now you have 307. To this day, you can still use 302 or 307 (we're still in the transition period, where both still function identically)

A 301 will gradually transfer SEO authority from one page to another, over a few weeks / months - so that the old URL stops ranking and the new URL 'has a chance' of ranking in its place. If the new URL has highly dissimilar content (in machine-terms) then the 301 fails to transfer a portion of the authority and some is 'deleted' (vented into cyberspace)

A 302 retains the ranking benefit on the old page and nothing is transferred to the new page (period). Over time (a month or six) the 302 will decay. Slowly the authority (which has been kept on the old URL) will begin to 'die off' and you end up (in an extreme situation) with no authority left anywhere from that particular URL (it's just gone). 307s function the same way

As such, using a 302 or 307 is the correct measure, but remember - Google will be watching to check that the redirect really is temporary. If your whole company forgets about restoring the content to the original URL (for a significant period of time) then don't expect that there will be anything left when you come back

In an ideal world, you'd turn it all around inside of one month if you wanted some good juice left when you lifted the 302 / 307