In yesterday's entry on what you should do about extra query parameters on your URLs, I said that you should answer with a HTTP redirect to the canonical URL of the page and that I thought this should be a permanent redirect instead of a temporary one for reasons that didn't fit into the entry. Because Aristotle Pagaltzis asked, here is why I think permanent redirects are the right option.

As far as I know, there are two differences in client behavior (including web spider behavior) between permanent HTTP redirects and temporary ones, which is that clients don't cache temporary redirects and don't consider them to change the canonical URL of the resource. If you use permanent redirects, you thus probably make it more likely that web search engines will conclude that your canonical URL really is the canonical URL and they don't need to keep re-checking the other one, at the potential downside of having browsers cache the redirect and never re-check it.

So the question is if you'll ever want to change the redirect or otherwise do something else when you get a request with those extra query parameters. My belief is that this is unlikely. To start with, you're probably not going to reuse other people's commonly used extra query parameters for real query parameters of your own, because other people use them and will likely overwrite your values with theirs.

(In related news, if you were previously using a 's=..' query parameter for your own purposes on URLs that people will share around social media, someone out there has just dumped some pain on top of you. Apparently it may be Twitter instead of my initial suspect of Slack, based on a comment on this entry.)

If you change the canonical URL of the page, you're going to need a redirect for the old canonical URL anyway, so people with the 'extra query parameters' redirect cached in their browser will just get another redirect. They can live with that.

The only remaining situation I can think of where a cached permanent redirection would be a problem would be if you want to change your web setup so that you deliberately react to specific extra query parameters (and possibly their values) by changing your redirects or rendering a different version of your page (without a redirect). This strikes me as an unlikely change for most of my readers to want to make (and I'm not sure how common customizing pages to the apparent traffic source is in general).

(Also, browsers don't cache permanent redirects forever, so you could always turn the permanent redirects into temporary ones for a few months, then start doing the special stuff.)

PS: I don't think most clients do anything much about changing the 'canonical URL' of a resource if the initial request gets a permanent redirect. Even things like syndication feed readers don't necessarily update their idea of your feed's URL if you provide permanent redirects, and web browsers are even less likely to change things like a user's bookmarks. These days, even search engines may more or less ignore it, because people do make mistakes with their permanent redirects.