301 redirects: what changed in 2026
Redirects preserve link equity when URLs move, and broken chains leak it. The guidance that held two years ago no longer matches current behaviour.
Why 301 redirects matters
Treat 301 redirects as part of the site's technical baseline rather than a one-off task. The checks below are the ones worth repeating.
Confirm 301 redirects is present and reachable on the live domain.
Compare what is published against what the crawler actually fetched.
Record the result so the next audit has something to compare against.
Demo article generated for testing crawl, indexing and structured data coverage on this site.
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