(Entry was posted by Shawn Cohe on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/11/2014).

Is it possible the "302 redirect passes no authority" rule of thumb is no longer valid?

A competitor I`m researching on behalf of a new client has 302 redirected their entire site to HTTPS URLs but has no noticeable dip in rankings for the past two years.

The HTTP pages are still listed as top pages in Open Site Explorer but the HTTPS pages have been cached by Google.

Is it possible the "302 redirect passes no authority" rule of thumb is no longer valid??

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Shawn Cohen: A competitor I'm researching on behalf of a new client has 302 redirected their entire site to HTTPS URLs but has no noticeable dip ;in rankings for the past two years.

The HTTP pages are still listed as top pages in Open Site Explorer but the HTTPS pages have been cached by Google.

Is it possible the "302 redirect passes no authority" rule of thumb is no longer valid?
Tony McCreath: OSE is not Google so what they do has no significance.

302 flags a temporary change. If Google sees it for a long time they may lose trust and consider it like a 301.

I don't see any reason for Google to punish this and drop the websites rankings.

What would be interesting is to know if Google ranks the http or https versions. That would indicate how they are treating the 302s.
Shawn Cohen: Thanks, Tony. And yes, https pages are ranking consistently across a variety of terms.
Tony McCreath: Sounds like Google decided the 302s should be 301s after all that time.
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Duanne Forrester at Bing mentioned that they do this (treating 302s as 301s if left for a long time), so I wouldn't be surprised if Google has a similar policy.