What Is a 302 Redirect? When to Use One

A 302 redirect sends visitors from one URL to another while telling search engines the move is temporary. Google keeps the original URL in its index and continues to treat it as the real page. Use a 302 only when you genuinely intend to bring the original URL back — otherwise a 301 is the correct code.

What the status code actually communicates

Both a 301 and a 302 land the visitor in the same place. A human can't tell them apart. The difference is entirely a message to the crawler about which URL is the canonical one going forward.

301 — moved permanently: the destination is the new home. Google consolidates signals onto it and drops the old URL from the index.
302 — found: the original is still the real page, it's just unavailable right now. Google keeps indexing the original URL and generally does not transfer its ranking signals to the destination.

That second behaviour is the entire point of the code, and it's also why a misapplied 302 is quietly expensive. Serve a 302 for a page you moved permanently and you've told Google to keep ranking a URL you no longer want ranked.

When a 302 is the right call

There are legitimate uses, and they share one trait: the original URL is coming back.

A/B or split tests. You're sending a slice of traffic to a variant while the control URL remains the page you want indexed. Google's guidance on testing specifically recommends 302 for this.
Short maintenance windows. Though for genuine downtime, a 503 with a Retry-After header is a better signal than a redirect.
Out-of-stock or seasonal pages you intend to restock — sending shoppers to the category page while keeping the product URL alive.
Geo or currency routing where the user can override the choice and the generic URL stays canonical.
Login and paywall gates that bounce an unauthenticated user to a sign-in screen and return them afterwards.
Short-term campaign URLs pointing at a landing page that will change again next quarter.

When a 302 is a mistake

Everything permanent. If any of these describes your situation, use a 301:

A page's URL or slug changed for good.
You moved domain, or rebranded.
You forced HTTP → HTTPS, or www → non-www.
You merged two thin pages into one strong one.
You deleted a page that had backlinks and redirected it to the nearest equivalent.

The failure mode is subtle: nothing visibly breaks. Users reach the right page, the site works, and analytics look normal. Meanwhile the old URL stays in the index, the new URL struggles to accumulate its own authority, and nobody connects the flat rankings to a three-character difference in a config file.

Do 302 redirects pass link equity?

Mostly, but not to the URL you'd expect — and that distinction is what makes 302s risky for anyone who has spent effort earning links.

Google has stated since 2016 that no PageRank is lost through any 3xx redirect. The catch is where it lands. Because a 302 tells Google the original URL remains canonical, the signals from links pointing at that URL stay attached to the original. The destination page doesn't inherit them.

For a genuine temporary redirect that's correct behaviour — you want the original to hold its position while it's briefly diverted. For a permanent move it's a problem, because the page you want to rank is not the page holding the authority, and the links you earned are propping up a URL you've abandoned.

Google will often work this out eventually. A 302 that stays in place for long enough tends to get reinterpreted as permanent, because the observed behaviour contradicts the declared intent. But "eventually" is not a timeline you control, it can take weeks or months, and during that window your rankings sit with the wrong URL. If the move is permanent, say so in the status code rather than waiting for Google to guess.

Accidental 302s are the common case

Most harmful 302s aren't decisions. They're defaults. Worth checking:

WordPress issues temporary redirects in several places, and some plugins default to 302 in their redirect manager UI.
Cloudflare, Netlify and Vercel rules default to a temporary code unless you explicitly set permanent: true or the status.
Load balancers and reverse proxies frequently emit 302s for canonical host rules.
Site builders on hosted platforms often use 302 for slug changes with no option to change it.
Trailing-slash and lowercase normalisation rules written years ago and never revisited.
HTTPS enforcement configured as a temporary redirect — one of the most damaging versions of this mistake, because it applies to every URL on the site at once.

Finding them is straightforward: crawl the site and filter the response codes, or check a single URL from a terminal with curl -sIL https://example.com/old-page and read the status of each hop. A browser will not tell you — a 301 and a 302 look identical from the address bar.

302 vs 307 vs meta refresh vs JavaScript

Method	Permanence signal	Notes
302	Temporary	The standard temporary redirect; may change the request method
307	Temporary	Same intent, but preserves POST data — use it for forms and APIs
Meta refresh	Ambiguous	Google may treat an instant one like a redirect, but it's slow and bad for users
JavaScript redirect	Ambiguous	Only works once the page renders; unreliable for crawlers and slower for everyone

Server-side beats client-side every time. Meta refresh and JS redirects exist mostly on sites where nobody had server access, and they should be replaced with a real status code whenever that's possible.

Frequently asked questions

Is a 302 redirect bad for SEO? Not when the move is genuinely temporary — that's exactly what the code is for. It's harmful when used for a permanent move, because it keeps the wrong URL indexed and leaves your link equity attached to a page you've retired.

Will Google eventually treat a long-running 302 as a 301? Often, yes. Google has said it interprets redirects that persist as permanent regardless of the declared code. But the timing is unpredictable and you lose nothing by using the correct code from the start.

Does a 302 redirect pass backlinks? The link value stays with the original URL, since Google still considers that the canonical page. If you want links pointing at an old URL to strengthen a new one, you need a 301.

How do I check whether a redirect is a 301 or a 302? Run curl -sIL <url> and read the status line of each hop, use your browser's network tab, or crawl the site with a tool that reports status codes. The rendered page looks the same either way.

What about 307? A 307 carries the same temporary meaning as a 302 but guarantees the HTTP method is preserved, so a POST stays a POST. Prefer it for form submissions and API endpoints; for ordinary page redirects the two behave alike.

Should I use a 302 while I'm redesigning a page? If the URL isn't changing, you don't need a redirect at all. If you're temporarily pointing an old URL at a placeholder and will restore it, a 302 is right. If the old URL is going away, use a 301 straight away.

Where this touches link building

Every redirect on your site sits between someone else's link and your content. Get the code wrong and the link still works for humans while doing less than it should for you.

Two habits are worth building. First, whenever you change a URL that has earned links, use a 301 and leave it in place indefinitely — that's the difference between moving a page and losing it, covered in more depth in what happens to backlinks when you migrate a site. Second, audit your redirects after any migration, replatform, or CDN change, because that's when temporary codes get introduced silently and chains start forming. And if you have live exchange partners linking to a page you're about to move — on Backlinkster, where each swap is verified live by code — a clean permanent redirect keeps those placements working instead of quietly pointing at a URL you've orphaned.

The bottom line

A 302 says "this page is coming back." That's a useful thing to be able to say, and there are real situations that call for it — tests, restocks, login gates, brief diversions. It is not a general-purpose redirect. If the original URL is never returning, a 302 leaves your rankings and your backlinks attached to a page you've abandoned, and hoping Google reinterprets it is a worse plan than typing a different number.