Plenty of 302 Redirects, can they harm SERP?

[GardenPet]

Hi my client has recently relaunched the website and they use a lot of 302 redirects because they want Google to crawl the pages. They do not plan to add any content to those pages. I advised 301 instead but they do not want to do this. Can too many 302s harm their rankings?

[Davenport-Tractor]

Garden Pet,

Do you mean they don't plan to change the content to those pages? Because if you meant to say that your client plans to 302 redirect to pages that have NO CONTENT then your asking for a huge problem they may never be able to recover from under their base URL.

If the old page is being redirected to a page that has no content the new URL will eventually get crawled, nothing will be found, and the black hat flag will get raised for the new page.

[GardenPet]

They use all 302 redirects for old pages to point to their home page.

[Everett]

Having too many 302s won't necessarily harm rankings in-and-of itself. However, don't expect the pagerank from those old pages to be applied to the new page / home page.

Also, redirects, whether 302 or 301, which link from a specific page to the home page are often treated as 404s anyway.