<b>Q: I used 302 redirects by accident. Did I ruin my migration?</b>

<b>Q: I used 302 redirects by accident. Did I ruin my migration?</b>

Short answer: no, you didn't ruin anything — but fix them this week.

Long answer: A 301 says 'moved permanently,' a 302 says 'moved temporarily.' Google usually figures out a 302 is really permanent after it sees it for a while and passes signals anyway. But 'usually' and 'eventually' aren't what you want during a move. A permanent 301 tells Google to swap the indexed URL immediately and consolidate ranking signals fast. A 302 can leave the OLD URL lingering in the index, which is exactly the confusion a migration should avoid.

The most common cause: server config or a plugin defaulting to 302. Sometimes it's a framework redirect helper where you forgot the status-code argument.

Next step: crawl your redirect list, filter for status 302, change those rules to 301, and re-test the corrected ones with a header checker. No need to redo the whole migration.