308 redirect

Both 301 and 308 signal that a page has permanently moved. The one real difference is at the protocol level. A 301 Moved Permanently is allowed to switch the follow-up request to GET, and older clients often do exactly that, so a POST /checkout can silently turn into a GET. A 308 forbids that rewrite. The method and body carry over unchanged, which is why 308 is the correct pick for API endpoints and form submissions where the verb matters.

For search it does not matter

Google’s redirects documentation lists both HTTP 301 and HTTP 308 as permanent redirect types, and says Googlebot follows the redirect and the indexing pipeline “uses the redirect as a signal that the redirect target should be canonical.” So a 308 consolidates ranking signals onto the new URL exactly like a 301. There is no ranking penalty for choosing one over the other.

A minimal response looks like this:

HTTP/1.1 308 Permanent Redirect
Location: https://example.com/new-path

One practical warning: a 308 is cached hard by browsers, so a mistaken one is painful to undo (visitors keep hitting the stale target from cache). Set it deliberately, and always do it at the server level rather than a meta refresh or a JavaScript hop, which crawlers process slower and less reliably.