Going from 302 redirect to 301 redirect weeks after changing URL structure
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I made a small change on an ecommerce site that had big impacts I didn't consider...
About six weeks ago in an effort to clean up one of many SEO-related problems on an ecommerce site, I had a developer rewrite the URLs to replace underscores with hyphens and redirect all pages throughout the site to that page with the new URL structure.
We didn't immediately update our sitemap to reflect the changes (bad!) and I just discovered all the redirects are 302s...
Since these changes, most of the pages have a page authority of 1 and we have dropped several spots in organic search. If we were to setup 301 redirects for the pages that we changed the URL structure would there be any changes in organic search placement and page authority or is it too late?
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I would proceed with changing 302 redirects to 301 redirects. A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect that passes 0% of link juice (ranking power). If you change to 301 you'll start passing link juice again, and may see a recovery in ranking in time.
Here's some more info on redirects as it relates to SEO: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/learn/seo/redirection
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