302 redirect

The status code is officially named 302 Found. When a browser receives it, it automatically requests the URL in the Location header and sends the user to the new page, while the original URL stays the address of record.

How Google treats it

That last part is the SEO catch. Google’s guidance states that for a temporary redirect, “the indexing pipeline doesn’t use the redirect as a signal that the redirect target should be canonical.” So a 302 keeps the old URL in search results as the canonical version, and ranking value stays tied to that original URL instead of consolidating on the destination. (Google’s Gary Illyes has said no PageRank is lost through any 30x redirect, so the issue is which URL Google treats as canonical, not signals leaking away.) A 301 does the opposite, telling Google the destination should be canonical.

One more gotcha: per the Fetch standard, a 302 can rewrite a POST into a GET on the follow-up request. If you need the method preserved, use 307, which behaves like a 302 but keeps the original request method.

Use a 302 only when the move really is temporary: an A/B test, a maintenance page, a geolocation split, or a seasonal landing page you plan to revert. If the change is actually permanent and you ship a 302 by mistake, Google can eventually treat a long-standing temporary redirect like a permanent one, since signals such as internal and external links pointing at the destination push it to pick that URL. But there is no fixed timeline, and you may sit through weeks or months of suboptimal indexing first, so set the correct status code from the start rather than counting on Google to sort it out.