[wp-hackers] 302 redirect - why?

[Eric Marden]

> We're currently still researching
> things but it looks like a bit that this can couse google to penalize
> a wordpress blog.

302 is a temporary redirect.
301 is permanent.

If you move a resource to another URL you want to use 301s to tell  
clients, including google, where they can find the new resource and to  
update their links to use this new URL. Google won't penalize you for  
redirects, unless you are trying to something fishy like have a page  
indexed highly for one topic, but then redirect the page after its  
been indexed to another page with a different topic. In other words,  
302 redirects are not 'bad' and in this case are used because using  
any other response code would not semantically make sense.

-e