Understanding the 302 redirect

[l_martin]

I know what a 302 redirect means!! Its a temporary redirect. But I want to know the use of it.

Say an url of mine is under maintenance then why should just do a 301 redirect to the intended redirect page. It will work more effectively, right??!!

And when the maintenance work is done I will just remove the 301 redirect.

[avinash]

The problem that you will face here if you do a 301 redirect is that search engines like Google will de-index your page which is under maintenance and index the 301 redirected page permanently. And when you will remove the 301 redirect Google will don't know which page to rank and the page will be loose its rank.

[lucky91]

I am not sure about 302 but once I placed a valid 301 redirect to a suitable page by mistake. And the host page lost rankings although the 301 redirect was only live for few hours.

[steveposter]

Let's say for a maintenance website, 302 redirect would be recommended while for some old page to new page 301 redirect will be the best.