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How much authority does a 301 pass to a different domain?
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Hi,
A client of mine is selling his business to a brand new company. The brand new company will be using a brand new domain (no way to avoid that unfortunately) and the current domain (which has tons of authority, links, shares, tweets, etc.) will not be used. Added to that, the new company will be taking over all the current content with just a few minor changes. (I know, I wish we could use the old domain but we can't.)
Obviously, I am redirecting all pages on the current domain to the new domain via 301 redirects on a page by page basis. So, current.com/product-page-x.html redirects to new.com/product-page-x.html.
My client and the new company both are asking me how much link juice (and other factors) are passed along to the new domain from the old domain. All I can find is "not the full value" or variants thereof.My experience with 301 redirects in the past has been within a single domain and I've seen some of those pages have decent authority and decent rankings as a result of the 301 (no other optimization work was done or links were added).
Are there any studies out there that I'm missing that show how much authority/juice gets passed and/or lost via a 301 redirect? Anybody with a similar issue see any trends in page/domain authority and/or rankings?
Thanks for any insights and opinions you have.
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We did a non E commerce site in late July/early August. Client had home page PA of 42 and DA of 38. This was to an entirely new domain. It took about 3 - 4 weeks and he is at same as before. (Not always the case, but this was 99.9%)
I would make sure that in the changeover, if someone new is handling new domain they have correctly handled the canonical redirect. Especially if there is any issue around web site and compensation, etc.
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Ryan is bob on

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301 redirects pass over 90% of their value to the target page.
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