When Do You Use A 302?

SEOs have been taught that the knee jerk reaction is to use a 301 whenever you want to redirect. Sometimes, the correct answer is not 301; the answer should be 302 (or even 304 or 307). I am speaking on this topic at SMX West in February and I am looking for suggestions/examples of times when members have used other types of redirects to achieve the desired effect. Here are the examples I have already:

• When you want to display a shorter URL but the content lives deep inside within the information architecture.
• Geo-local redirection without changing the ranking for the underlying page.
• Sales, seasonal, and events related listings that keep changing…where you want the core page to rank, but want to be able to send people to an updated section.
• When some of your related content lives in a sub-domain and you want to maintain your information hierarchy.
• When you are calling legacy applications or have an application with parameters contained in the URL and you want to create search friendly URLs.
• To avoid canonical confusion when the page or application is moved to the https layer (it is unlikely you will get users to link properly to a secure page)
• When you are calling a 3rd party shopping cart and don’t want to display the URL in the code of the page.
• When you are calling an affiliate link within the target page. **

**Google quality raters have specific instructions to look for hidden/misleading redirects, so use with caution.

Thanks, Aaron, for suggestions 2 and 3!