301 vs 302 redirect for ?url=URL

Question

I have the following URL for affiliates:

http://www.mydomain.com/affiliates/partners/partnerName.do?url=http://www.mydomain.com/product/3

The value of url will change all the time.

For this, I have used a 302 redirect. I chose to do this because http://www.mydomain.com/affiliates/partners/partnerName.do can be redirected to several pages (because the url parameter can equal anything) and not just one page. I believe this is the correct thing to do, but someone from our marketing department told me not to use 302 redirects and to use a 301 redirect, because several SEO articles say 302 redirects are bad. I just want to confirm that the 302 redirect is the proper redirect to use for this particular case.

Answer 1

302 redirects aren't bad for SEO as they are probably the most common redirect in use today. In fact, PHP's header() function sends the 302 HTTP response by default.

Here's what Matt Cutts had to say about 302 redirects. Basically they are fine and Google will find and index those links properly. It looks like Google will show the original URL instead of or in addition to the redirected URL. Yahoo does the same and Bing will show the redirected URL.

Answer 2

If you wish to redirect some pages temporarily, then I would recommend a 302 redirect. And if you wish to redirect permanently I would recommend using a 301 redirect.