A 302 redirect sends people to another address for now, while signalling that the original URL is still the real one and will come back. Visitors notice no difference from a permanent redirect. The difference is in what search engines do with the old address.
What "temporary" means to browsers and Google
The server answers with status 302 Found and a Location header. Browsers follow it but do not cache it the way they cache a 301, so they check the original URL again next time. Google normally keeps the original URL in its index and shows it in results.
Two related codes exist. 307 Temporary Redirect is the strict version that guarantees a form submission stays a POST rather than becoming a GET. 303 See Other is used after a form is submitted to send the browser to a results page. For SEO, Google treats 302 and 307 alike.
A sensible use: a seasonal closure
A café closes for two weeks in August and wants anyone who visits its online ordering page to see a notice instead. It 302-redirects /order to /closed-for-summer. Google keeps /order as the page that appears in search, and when the café removes the redirect in September nothing has to recover. A 301 here would have told Google to swap the ordering page for the closure notice.
Other fair uses: sending visitors to a country or language version based on location (while still letting crawlers reach every version), A/B tests that split traffic between two URLs, and a maintenance page during a short outage (though a 503 status is the better signal for planned downtime).
When to stop using a 302
If a "temporary" redirect stays in place for months, Google says it may start treating it as permanent and index the target instead. That is unpredictable, so if a move is final, change it to a 301 rather than waiting for Google to guess. Some site builders and plugins default to 302 for any redirect; check the setting when you move pages.
302 mistakes
- Using a 302 for a permanent move, such as http to https or an old domain to a new one.
- Redirecting crawlers by location so Googlebot, crawling mostly from US addresses, never sees other regional versions.
- Forgetting to remove it after the promotion or closure ends.
- Chaining a 302 into a 301, which muddles the signal and adds fetches to your crawl budget.
Related terms
- 301 redirect: the permanent version, explained in full.
- Canonical tag: another way to say which URL is the main one.
- URL: the address being redirected.
- Indexing: where the 301 versus 302 choice shows its effect.