2 Questions about 301 Redirects
-
So I have a couple of questions about 301 redirects:
- Do Google penalties EVER pass through a 301? I've done 20+ domain 301s in the last year and have yet to see it happen, but the other day I read a an article (or maybe it was a QA post?) that suggested doing 302s to avoid transferring penalties. Has anyone seen any authoritative information regarding this?
- I 301'd a domain in February that another SEO firm had built a lot of spammy links and I began building contextual links for it at a very slow rate (like 10 or so a month). Within a month, my domain authority was a 26 on the new domain and my inbound links were non existent. By month 2, my links were 70k and domain authority was 34. By month 3, down to 25k inbound links and domain authority of 29, where it has settled for the last 3 months despite some really high quality links. My question (don't worry it's coming), is does anyone have any clue why my links shot up so quickly and then dropped? I'm assuming the 301 links kicked in and then only about 45% ended up 'sticking'??
Thanks in advance
-
Do Google penalties EVER pass through a 301?
Yes. 301 redirects make sure end users, search bots and link equity are passed to the new page. It is true though that not all link equity is passed with a 301, however good or bad it is passed. I have found this out with my own testing with clients as well as a few post i found on SEO round table and Google groups.
Does anyone have any clue why my links shot up so quickly and then dropped?
Where you tracking your external links use OSE? If so they crawl a different amount of domains and URLs each time they update their index so chances are you are looking at different data sets each time.
-
Brian-
1. In a hangout two or three months ago, John Mueller said that 301s can pass a penalty. Whether or not a 302 will do so as well, I don't know, but I'd be hesitant to bet on them not doing so. We've never tried redirecting in a penalty situation. I have spoken to some colleagues, however, that say they've had clients come to them that had 301'd and the penalty showed up on a new domain shortly thereafter.
2. Did your drop-off happen to coincide with a Penguin update? At one time, Matt C. had said that the results of cleaning up a link profile wouldn't really come into play until the next update (for an algorithmic slap). But others and I have seen instances in which that seems to no longer always be the case - 2 weeks to two months, with no update, is showing evidence of removed dampening.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirect from old domain to a new domain
Hi, assuming i have an old domain that i would like to redirect it to the new domain because the old domain contain good links on it and been ranking for its keywords. Would it be a wise choice? and can i redirect my sub domain into my new one too? for example website1.com/life > website2.com/life and how do i do so? can i do that by hosting the old domain in my new domain hosting and do all those redirect include sub domain redirect?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
301 redirect a set of pages to one landing page/URL?
I'm planning to redirect the following pages to one new URL/landing page: Old URLs: http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/1 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/2 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/3 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/4 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/5 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/6 New URL: http://www.newdomain.com/new-folder/new-page Code in .htaccess that I will be using: RedirectMatch 301 /folder/page/(.*) http://www.newdomain.com/new-folder/new-page Let me know if this is correct. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
URL structure: 301 redirect or leave as is?
Hello, My website, www.coloringbookfun.com is very old and authoritative, but the URL structure is terrible. If you check out some of our subcategories such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda and individual printables such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda/imagepages/image2.html You can see that they aren't optimized. I am curious to know the pros and cons of fixing the URL structure and 301ing them to the new optimized url. Will 301ing lose authority and backlinks for the sites pages? Does optimizing the url structure outweigh losing the authority/backlinks?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
301, 404 or 410? what is the best practice
Hi I'm currently working on a project to correct some really bad practices from years of different SEO's. Basically they had made around 1500 pages of delivery counties and town, only change 3 words on every page. Now apart from duplicate content issues, this has really hammered the site with the latest round of Panda updates. I've pulled the pages, but i'm in several frames of mind on how to best fix this. The pages won't ever be used again, so i'm thinking a 410 code would be best, but reading another post: http://moz.com/community/q/server-redirect-query i'm not sure if i should just let them go to 404's if anyone ever finds them. Incidentally i'm Disavowing over 1100 root domains, so extremely unlikely to find links out there.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eminent1 -
Penalised by Google - Should I Redirect to a new domain?
Last month my rankings dropped a couple of pages on Google and am no longer receiving as many visits from Google as I used to. It's coming up to summer which is the time my business naturally picks up yet I can't fix this problem. I have a crazy idea of redirecting my established site onto a new domain in hopes that the penalty would be removed. I have tried removing any manipulative links yet my ranking are not coming back. Anyone had success in redirecting to a new domain?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | penn730 -
Possibly a dumb question - 301 from a banned domain to new domain with NEW content
I was wondering if banned domains pass any page rank, link love, etc. My domain got banned and I AM working to get it unbanned, but in the mean time, would buying a new domain, and creating NEW content that DOES adhere to the google quality guidelines, help at all? Would this force an 'auto-evaluation' or 're-evaluation' of the site by google? or would the new domain simply have ZERO effect from the 301 unless that old domain got into google's good graces again.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ilyaelbert0 -
Beaten in SERP's by a site going 'all in' on 2 keywords in their anchor text profile.
I would like to get peoples thoughts on putting 80% of your anchor text links in just 2 keywords vs a nice spread of branded and longtail keywords.. like I am. recently fell off the first page for a key SERP.. and the site in P10 has gone nuts on just that two keyword's.. I know we have a good site onpage/ conversion / low bounce rate page views etc.. Pretty sure we get more traffic than them. Seems that this obvious bloated anchor text profiling has worked for them though.. What do you guys think/know?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robertrRSwalters0