302 redirect

When 302 is the right choice

Legitimate use cases:

• A/B test routing — temporary redirect to a variant URL for testing
• Geographic content routing — redirecting EU users to /eu/ version of a page (where the original URL is still canonical for the global audience)
• Maintenance redirects — pointing users to a status page during outages
• Authentication redirects — sending unauthenticated users to login while preserving the canonical
• Short-term campaign URLs — /promo/spring2025/ → /products/spring/ for the campaign duration

In each case, the original URL is the long-term canonical; the redirect is genuinely temporary.

When 302 is misused (the SEO problem)

The classic mistake: using 302 for a permanent migration because:

• Developer was uncertain whether to use 301 or 302 and picked 302 as “safer”
• Framework default was 302 (some frameworks default to temporary)
• Manual configuration error

Symptoms:

• Old URL stays indexed after migration
• New URL has trouble ranking (Google still thinks the old URL is canonical)
• Signal flow is inconsistent
• Search Console shows both URLs as separate entries

The fix: change to 301. Google will gradually consolidate to the new URL.

How Google treats 302 in 2026

Historically Google passed less ranking signal through 302s than 301s. The current state is more nuanced:

• For brief 302 chains (1 hop), Google may treat them similarly to 301s in some cases
• For sustained 302 redirects (months / years), Google’s interpretation depends on consistency: a stable 302 may eventually be treated as canonical-moved
• For chains involving 302s, signal preservation is less predictable than pure-301 chains

The safer pattern: if the redirect is permanent, ALWAYS use 301. Don’t rely on Google’s eventual interpretation.

Detection

Use any of:

• curl -I — shows the HTTP status code in the response headers
• Chrome DevTools Network tab — shows the full redirect chain with status codes
• Screaming Frog / Sitebulb — sitewide crawl flags all 302s
• Search Console URL Inspection — shows redirect type for crawled URLs

Common patterns to audit out

• Site-wide HTTP→HTTPS using 302 (should be 301)
• www→non-www (or vice versa) using 302
• Trailing slash normalization using 302
• Old paths from a migration that never got changed to 301

Resocial perspective

We audit redirect type as part of every technical engagement. The most common find: legacy 302s from migrations 2-5 years ago that should have been 301s. Converting them is mechanical and produces gradual ranking consolidation as Google re-evaluates. See our Technical SEO service.