What is a 302 Redirect and what is it for? |

Today’s article we want to explain what are 302 redirectswhat they are for, when to use them and the differences that exist with 301 redirects. If you have a blog or a website, this information can be very useful to enter the SEO world.

At some point you may find yourself in the situation of having to change the content from one place to another, but avoiding harming your positioning, so it is important to do the redirects correctly.

What are 302 redirects and what are they for?

With redirects we avoid errors and help search engines to crawl the web page. In the case of 302 redirect it is a response code that indicates to search engines that they have to go to the page that is redirected but temporarily.

That is, when we implement a 302 redirect, we take users or google bots (who crawl the information) from a wrong page to a different URL that interests us.

When to use a 302 redirect?

The 302 redirection will be used in very special circumstances since it is not very common that we have the need to carry out this type of redirection. In some cases, we may find ourselves in the situation of having to do so:

• • Wrong content on one of our pages: we can redirect users to another page they might be interested in while we fix the problem. This way we will not lose a user or possible conversion.
  • We can use 302 redirects if we need restore a page for technical problems or in the event of an attack on our website. Thus, while we restore the page, we can offer an alternative or similar content.

Why use 302 redirects?

As we have mentioned before, 302 redirects are temporary, so it is very useful when you need to redirect content to a website but it will not be definitive. Keep in mind that these redirects must be done in very specific cases and for a limited time.

In addition, once we remove the redirection, the website will continue to maintain its position since the SEO force is not transferred to the new page. In other words, while the 302 redirection lasts, the force previously acquired from the page in question does not dilute the link juice to the redirected page, but rather it remains as it was at the beginning before making the redirection.

Differences between 302 and 301 redirect

It is very important to use the redirects correctly and to know the differences between them in order to know which one to choose. Depending on our problem and/or objective, we will choose one type of redirection or another.

One of the main differences between both redirects is what we mentioned above, that in 302 redirects, force is not transferred to the new URL. Therefore, once the redirect is removed, the original page will not lose its position in the Google search engine.

And the other distinction is temporality since one will be permanent and a 302 redirect to a new URL will be temporary, but we will have to take into account that we must manually remove the code when we want to end the 302 redirect

How to create a 302 redirect?

In fact, there is no single way to create 302 redirectsso we will explain in detail the two most common ways to do it:

302 redirects in the .htaccess file

1. Access the FTP or Cpanel and look for the .htaccess file in the root directory.

2. Once inside the file, we recommend writing the code at the very end:

Redirect 302 /page1/ https://mydomain.com/page2/

3. With this code you are creating a 302 redirect so that when the user or the bots enter the page https://mydomain.com/page1/ take you to the content of https://mydomain.com/page2/

4. Save the file with the changes so that the redirection is operational.

5. Once we want to have page 1 operative again, we just have to enter the .htaccess file again and delete the line of code inserted.

302 redirects with WordPress plugin

If you prefer to create a 302 redirection with a WordPress plugin, simply install the Redirection plugin and follow a few simple steps to do it:

1. 1. The first thing is to install the plugin, we go to the plugins section > add new > and in the search engine we put “Redirection” > Install > Activate.
   2. Then, we have to go to the plugin settings to be able to create the redirection. We go to Tools> Redirection> “Add new”
   3. A drop-down will appear with several options and we will have to put as indicated in the image:

1. • In the Source URL: we add the relative URL, that is, what goes after the domain. In our example it would be /page 1/ Query Parameters: Leave this as it is.
   • Destination URL: type the full URL you want to redirect the old content to, i.e. https://midomino.com/pagina2/
   • With the HTTP code: This is where we can choose the 302 redirect, we must be careful because by default 301 redirects appear, and in this case, since we do not want something permanent, we must select 302.

4. After adding our configuration, we click on “add redirection” and we would have already created our 302 redirection.