How long will a page hold its PageRank with a 302 redirect?

[Mydaho]

Would love to hear if anyone has any experience with using a 302 redirect to help ensure a page retains its PageRank until its time to switch the 302 redirect to a 301.

Here's the situation. The content provided for www.example.com/good-content is going away during the summer. The replacement content won't be available for a few months (maybe as much as 6 months). In the interim period, we'd like to implement a 302 redirect to a temporary page until the new page is built. At that time, we plan to switch the redirect from a 302 to a 301 and change the target landing page.

Is there a point at which we'll run out of time and this strategy won't work?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The bottom line is the content is gone and no replacement is available, the correct code would be 410. If at all possible leave the old content in place and simply append a note letting visitors know what's going on and avoid redirection completely. If long term pagerank is important for this page avoiding any kind of redirection would be wise, as would leaving a static copy of whatever was there before (disable outdated links of course).

[Mydaho]

Thanks. That suggestion could work very well and is certainly worth trying since the alternative doesn't seem to have any great virtues.