Q: I accidentally used 302 redirects for our migration — do I need to redo them all?

Q: I accidentally used 302 redirects for our migration — do I need to redo them all?

Don't panic, and don't feel silly — server defaults trick people into this all the time.

Short answer: yes, switch them to 301, but the damage so far is usually reversible.

Long answer: a 302 means "temporary," so Google keeps the OLD URL in the index and is slow to pass ranking to the new one. For a permanent move that's the wrong signal. Google has gotten better at treating long-lived 302s like 301s, but you shouldn't rely on it — you want the explicit permanent signal so consolidation isn't delayed.

The good news: because the old URL was kept around, fixing it to 301 isn't starting over, just correcting the instruction.

Next step: change the redirect type to 301, redeploy, then spot-check with curl -I oldurl and confirm it returns 301. Recovery follows the next crawl.