301 redirect: A server response that says a page has moved for good and sends visitors and crawlers to its new address. It is the standard way to retire or merge a page without losing its links.
Permanent versus temporary
Google groups redirects into two kinds. 301 and 308 are permanent: Google uses them as a signal that the redirect target should be canonical and shows the new address in results. 302, 303 and 307 are temporary: the old address usually stays in results. Use a 301 when the move is final — a merged post, a changed slug, a retired product — and a 302 only when you expect to switch back.
An example
A gardening site has three posts on pruning roses, written over four years, all ranking on page two. It merges the best of them into one guide, then 301-redirects the other two addresses to it. Links and bookmarks to the old posts now land on the merged guide, and Google is told which address to keep. Redirecting them to the home page instead would not have done the same job: an unrelated destination tends to be treated as a soft 404.
Doing it on WordPress
- When you change a published post’s slug, WordPress remembers the old one and redirects it to the post. That does not cover merges, deleted posts or changed categories in the URL; set those up explicitly.
- The Redirection plugin, Rank Math’s Redirections module and Yoast SEO Premium’s redirect manager all create 301s from the admin.
- Keep them. For site moves, Google advises keeping redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year; for individual posts there is no reason to remove them at all.
A redirect is for visitors from outside. Your own links should point at the new address directly, or every internal click goes through a hop — and a second rename turns it into a redirect chain.
The guide to merging, redirecting or retargeting competing posts covers when a redirect is the right answer and what to do with the links afterwards.