301 vs 308 comes up every time someone moves a site onto Vercel, Netlify or another modern host, checks their redirects, and finds 308s where they expected 301s. The question is always the same: did the platform just cost me my redirect equity? The answer from Google’s own documentation is no. For Search, 301 and 308 are the same signal.
Does Google treat 308 the same as 301?
Yes. Google’s redirect documentation puts it in one sentence: the 301 and 308 status codes mean that a page has permanently moved. Both are server-side permanent redirects, the strongest of the redirect types, and both work as what the canonicalization documentation calls a strong signal that the redirect target should be the canonical URL. Search results show the target, and the signals the old URL had collected are consolidated there.
The contrast that actually matters in that document is not 301 against 308, it is permanent against temporary. A 302 or 303 is a weak signal in the other direction: it tells Google the move is temporary, so the source URL tends to stay in results. The number of sites I have audited that “moved” pages years ago through a 302 that everyone forgot is not small, and that mistake changes what ranks. Swapping a 301 for a 308 changes nothing.
What is the actual difference between 301 and 308?
The difference lives in HTTP, not in SEO. Under the HTTP standard, a client following a 301 is allowed to change the request method, and browsers historically turned a redirected POST into a GET. A 308 forbids that: the method and body must be preserved, so a POST stays a POST. RFC 9110 defines 308 as the permanent twin of 307, exactly so that APIs and forms can redirect without the method silently rewriting.
That is why platforms emit it. A 308 is simply the more precise modern permanent redirect, and for a crawler doing GET requests all day the distinction never comes up.
What my own site actually serves
Rather than quote the docs and stop, I measured this site’s redirect chain today. shahidali.co runs on Vercel with www as the canonical host, and every hop is a 308:
Two hops from the worst starting point, the insecure apex, and one hop from everywhere else. Search Console has never raised a redirect issue on this property, and the pages rank under the www host, which is the practical proof that 308s consolidate exactly like 301s.
When should I actually worry about a redirect?
The status code family is the last thing I check on a redirect problem. These are the ones that actually bite:
- Chain length. Google’s crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops; Googlebot then reports a redirect error on the URL. Long chains waste crawl budget well before hop ten, so I collapse anything over two, but a two-hop http-to-https-to-www chain like mine is routine and fine.
- Temporary where you meant permanent. The 302 that never became a 301 is the classic. If Search Console shows Page with redirect on URLs you thought were long gone, this is the first thing to look at.
- Redirects to the wrong target. Mass-redirecting removed pages to the homepage gets treated as a soft 404, not a consolidation.
- Testing with the wrong tool. The URL Inspection live test does not follow redirects at all, by design, so it shows you hop one and stops. That fools people into thinking a chain is broken when it is fine. Fetch the chain with curl or your browser’s network panel instead.
A redirect that is genuinely misconfigured shows up downstream as pages falling out of the index, and the diagnosis path for that is the one in pages dropped out of the Google index.
So if your platform hands you 308s, keep them. The only wrong permanent redirect is the one that is not permanent.
Sources
- Google Search Central, redirects and Google Search, on 301 and 308 both meaning permanently moved, redirect strength, and the 10 hop limit, checked 30 August 2026
- Google Search Central, HTTP status codes and Google Search, on how 3xx codes are processed and inspection tools not following redirects
- IETF, RFC 9110, HTTP semantics, section 15.4.9, the 308 definition and method preservation
- My own redirect chain measurements on shahidali.co, 30 August 2026