Web site owners that aren't familiar with the technical side of things may have heard the phrases 301 redirect and 302 redirect in passing while reading about search engine marketing, but have never really had the chance to digest what it means. A conversation going on over at the Search Engine Watch forums this week about some redirect issues with MSN reminded me of that and I thought it might be a good idea to point to a primer to catch folks up.

Danny Sullivan has an easy-to-understand guide to 301 and 302 redirects and how the search engines currently handle them in an article from a few months back. Revisiting Hijacking & Redirects: Moving to a Solution was written for the non-techie to help them get a grip on what all this talk of page hijacking and redirects is all about. It's certainly worth a read, especially if you're coming at things from the marketing and business side rather than the technical side of things.