301 Redirect

A 301 tells the client and the crawler that a URL has permanently moved. It is the correct instrument for a migration, a URL change or a page consolidation, because it passes the ranking signals the old address accumulated to the new one rather than stranding them.

Redirects should resolve in one hop. Chains — A to B to C — waste crawl budget, slow the visitor, and in long enough chains cause the crawler to give up before reaching the destination. Chains accumulate quietly across migrations, so the audit is to request every old URL and check what it returns, not to read the redirect rules.

The other habit worth having is redirecting to the closest equivalent page rather than sweeping everything to the homepage. A mass redirect to the root is read as a soft 404, and the signals it was supposed to preserve are lost anyway.