A 302 redirect is a server response that sends a visitor from one URL to another while signalling that the move is only temporary. The original address stays the official one, so search engines keep it in their index instead of swapping in the destination.
Picture a shop with a sign on the door saying “back in 10 minutes, find us next door.” Customers go next door for now, but everyone understands the shop is coming back to its real location. That is the message a 302 sends, where a 301 redirect would mean “we have moved here for good.” Both are delivered through an HTTP header, and to a human clicking a link they look the same. The difference lives entirely in how search engines treat the original URL.
A few real cases fit a 302 well. You might route everyone to a holiday landing page for two weeks in December, send traffic to a backup page during a deploy, or split visitors between two versions of a product page in an experiment. In each one the original URL is meant to come back, which is exactly what a 302 promises. Watch one trap, though: leave a “temporary” 302 in place for months and Google will eventually start treating it as permanent anyway. A redirect that is going to stick around should be a 301.
Getting the choice right matters because mixing them up costs you. Use a 302 for a permanent move and your rankings stall on a URL you no longer use. Use a 301 for a quick test and you may permanently hand authority to a page you only meant to show for a week.
At TopDevs we pick the status code deliberately for each case, so temporary detours stay temporary and permanent moves carry your SEO value across.
