Google Redirects AdWords Traffic to Ads with 302 Redirect

Google recently renamed Google AdWords to Google Ads recently. Today, when you go to the former Google AdWords page, which was https://adwords.google.com, it redirects you to the new Google Ads page, which is https://ads.google.com/home/. This makes sense, as Google AdWords is now Google Ads.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is this:

HTTP/1.0 302 Found =>
Content-Type => application/binary
Cache-Control => no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate
Pragma => no-cache
Expires => Mon, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
Date => Wed, 25 Jul 2018 18:59:28 GMT
Location => https://ads.google.com/home/
P3P => CP=”This is not a P3P policy! See g.co/p3phelp for more info.”
acx-server-start-time => 1532545168444
acx-server-time => 11
x-trace-id => 6220742457720091993
Server => ESF
Content-Length => 0
X-XSS-Protection => 1; mode=block
X-Frame-Options => SAMEORIGIN
Set-Cookie => NID=135=f0qz2U9BMdyX5nUR2izj8ENopBQpo8-1lF5hNudxcFNQDaRJ0mnc81sMpYhceZyCursBfUL_KC7hmPXuHSkN9eHJEtXu5DHw6mue-hRPXD52ZfvRMR1lEWFZKKdcfchX;Domain=.google.com;Path=/;Expires=Thu, 24-Jan-2019 18:59:28 GMT;HttpOnly
Alt-Svc => quic=”:443″; ma=2592000; v=”44,43,39,35″

That’s the server header you get when you go to https://adwords.google.com. It serves up a 302 Temporary Redirect, and not a 301 Permanent Redirect, which Google vehemently recommends you use when moving URLs.

Does this mean that AdWords is temporarily moving to the new URL? It doesn’t mean that it’s permanently moving to ads.google.com/home/ though. Perhaps they will be moving it over to ads.google.com soon (without the /home/ in the URL), so that’s why they’re using a 302 Temporary Redirect. Who knows? Only Google knows if using a 302 redirect rather than a 301 redirect is a mistake or not.

Currently, because of the 302 redirect, when you search for Google AdWords, it still shows the old URL, even though it does redirect visitors to the new Google Ads URL.

h/t to Barry for pointing the 302 redirect out. You can check the server headers of any web page over at WebConfs.