301-Redirects, PageRank, Matt Cutts, Eric Enge & Barry Schwartz - Fact or Myth?
-
I've been trying to wrap my head around this for the last hour or so and thought it might make a good discussion. There's been a ton about this in the Q & A here, Eric Enge's interview with Matt Cutts from 2010 (http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml) said one thing and Barry Schwartz seemed to say another: http://searchengineland.com/google-pagerank-dilution-through-a-301-redirect-is-a-myth-149656
Is this all just semantics? Are all of these people really saying the same thing and have they been saying the same thing ever since 2010? Cyrus Shepherd shed a little light on things in this post when he said that it seemed people were confusing links and 301-redirects and viewing them as being the same things, when they really aren't. He wrote "here's a huge difference between redirecting a page and linking to a page." I think he is the only writer who is getting down to the heart of the matter. But I'm still in a fog.
In this video from April, 2011, Matt Cutts states very clearly that "There is a little bit of pagerank that doesn't pass through a 301-redirect." continuing on to say that if this wasn't the case, then there would be a temptation to 301-redirect from one page to another instead of just linking.
VIDEO - http://youtu.be/zW5UL3lzBOA
So it seems to me, it is not a myth that 301-redirects result in loss of pagerank.
In this video from February 2013, Matt Cutts states that "The amount of pagerank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of pagerank that dissipates through a link."
VIDEO - http://youtu.be/Filv4pP-1nw
Again, Matt Cutts is clearly stating that yes, a 301-redirect dissipates pagerank.
Now for the "myth" part. Apparently the "myth" was about how much pagerank dissipates via a 301-redirect versus a link.
Here's where my head starts to hurt:
Does this mean that when Page A links to Page B it looks like this:
A -----> ( reduces pagerank by about 15%)-------> B (inherits about 85% of Page A's pagerank if no other links are on the page
But say the "link" that exists on Page A is no longer good, but it's still the original URL, which, when clicked, now redirects to Page B via a URL rewrite (301 redirect)....based on what Matt Cutts said, does the pagerank scenario now look like this:
A (with an old URL to Page B) ----- ( reduces pagerank by about 15%) -------> URL rewrite (301 redirect) - Reduces pagerank by another 15% --------> B (inherits about 72% of Page A's pagerank if no other links are on the page)
Forgive me, I'm not a mathematician, so not sure if that 72% is right?
It seems to me, from what Matt is saying, the only way to avoid this scenario would be to make sure that Page A was updated with the new URL, thereby avoiding the 301 rewrite?
I recently had to re-write 18 product page URLs on a site and do 301 redirects. This was brought about by our hosting company initiating rules in the back end that broke all of our custom URLs. The redirects were to exactly the same product pages (so, highly relevant). PageRank tanked on all 18 of them, hard. Perhaps this is why I am diving into this question more deeply.
I am really interested to hear your point of view
-
Yes Doug, you totally get my confusion. Your scenarios describe more clearly exactly what I am wondering. In the case of your third example, Matt even stated pretty clearly in the video (perhaps even both videos) that chains of redirects can be a problem.
I totally agree with you that avoiding redirects altogether and updating the links is the way to go. Even Google's own Pagespeed Insight's tool often makes this recommendation when evaluating pagespeed of a site. If 301's are exactly the same as links, why would the tool recommend avoiding them?
Yes, I think perhaps Matt said what he did because he was looking at 301s and links in complete isolation. If so, then what he says is believable in theory, but I can't think of how it would actually happen in practice.
-
It is confusing and it's something I was wondering when I first saw the Matt Cutts, Feb 2013 video. From what Matt says:
- We know that a link won't pass all the page rank. Some page rank disipates over each link.
- the amount of page rank that dissipates though a 301 is identical to the amount that passes through a link.
But, I guess the problem with understanding this is that you can't take 301s and links and consider them in isolation. It's not an either/or.
Consider the following:
1. Page 1 -[link to]-> Page 2
Nice and simple, page 2 gets it's full entitlement of page rank ( taking into account share/link and dissipation)
2. Page 1 -[link to]-> 301 -> Page 3
Now I've got an extra step. Does this mean that the page rank that Page 3 inherits is affected by both the link and then the 301? Does the page rank dissipation happen twice?
If, say 50% (not real numbers!) of page rank value is lost for each link/301, then the original link to the 301 would lose %50 and the 301 would lose the same, (50% of the 50%) which means that page 3 get's just 25%
What if I end up in the horrible situation of having
3. Page 1 -[link to]-> 301 -> 301 -> 301 -> Page 3
Does page rank decay happen on every redirect?
Personally, I've only used redirects where necessary and, where I can, I've tried to get inbound links updated to point to the correct page.
-
Dana,
When you say "inherits about 72% of Page A's pagerank if no other links are on the page", I think that's where your understanding goes off track....either that, or it's where mine goes off track, because my understanding is that the percentage of PR that is passed from one page to another page is based on an unknown "X amount", not on the linking page's toolbar pagerank. I think is better to say ...inherits about 72% of the pagerank that page A is able to pass...---not 72% of Page A's pagrerank. Does that make sense?
-
In your second example above, the link would still pass 85% pagerank not 72%. Obviously, in order for a 301 to pass pagerank, it needs to be used in a link. If a 301 link only passed 72% pagerank, then it would always pass less pagerank than a regular link, which would contradict what Matt said.
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
-
Googles Search Intent – Plural & Singular KW’s
This is more of a ‘gripe’ than a question, but I would love to hear people’s views. Typically, when you search for a product using the singular and plural versions of the keyword Google delivers different SERPs. As an example, ‘leather handbag’ and ‘leather handbags’ return different results, but surely the search intent is exactly the same? You’d have thought Google was now clever enough to work this out. We tend to optimise our webpages for both the plural and singular variations of the KW’s, but see a mixed bag of results when analysing rankings. Is Google trying to force us to create a unique webpage for the singular version, and another unique webpage for the plural version? This would confuse the visitor, and make no sense.. the search intent is the same! How do you combat this problem? Many thanks in advance. Lee.
Algorithm Updates | | Webpresence0 -
Do we need to worry about external redirects?
Hi all, We always avoid internal redirects. Just wonder what if many of the out going links are redirecting to new links. I presume there is nothing wrong to host such links. Any ideas? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Have AMP pages on Chrome disappeared?
Hi, We amplified our site the other day and Google was quick to find our AMP pages. Today, we can´t seem to find any AMP pages on Chrome and it looks like we can´t find any other pages from sites like Wapo and so forth. They´re still visible on Safari. We are searching from Iceland. Is anyone experiencing this and if so, could you please share a link to the news? Thanks and have a nice day!
Algorithm Updates | | guidetoiceland0 -
Landing page redirect along with complete content
Hi Moz community, We have a page with "keyword" we are targeting in slug like website.com/keyword/. This page doesn't have much back-links or visits like homepage. So we decided to redirect homepage to /keyword page along with complete content. Will this going to hurt? Only change anybody can notice is URL. Are there any risks involved. I think this is the best way to highlight the page we been thinking about. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
SEO Myth-Busters -- Isn't there a "duplicate content" penalty by another name here?
Where is that guy with the mustache in the funny hat and the geek when you truly need them? So SEL (SearchEngineLand) said recently that there's no such thing as "duplicate content" penalties. http://searchengineland.com/myth-duplicate-content-penalty-259657 by the way, I'd love to get Rand or Eric or others Mozzers aka TAGFEE'ers to weigh in here on this if possible. The reason for this question is to double check a possible 'duplicate content" type penalty (possibly by another name?) that might accrue in the following situation. 1 - Assume a domain has a 30 Domain Authority (per OSE) 2 - The site on the current domain has about 100 pages - all hand coded. Things do very well in SEO because we designed it to do so.... The site is about 6 years in the current incarnation, with a very simple e-commerce cart (again basically hand coded). I will not name the site for obvious reasons. 3 - Business is good. We're upgrading to a new CMS. (hooray!) In doing so we are implementing categories and faceted search (with plans to try to keep the site to under 100 new "pages" using a combination of rel canonical and noindex. I will also not name the CMS for obvious reasons. In simple terms, as the site is built out and launched in the next 60 - 90 days, and assume we have 500 products and 100 categories, that yields at least 50,000 pages - and with other aspects of the faceted search, it could create easily 10X that many pages. 4 - in ScreamingFrog tests of the DEV site, it is quite evident that there are many tens of thousands of unique urls that are basically the textbook illustration of a duplicate content nightmare. ScreamingFrog has also been known to crash while spidering, and we've discovered thousands of URLS of live sites using the same CMS. There is no question that spiders are somehow triggering some sort of infinite page generation - and we can see that both on our DEV site as well as out in the wild (in Google's Supplemental Index). 5 - Since there is no "duplicate content penalty" and there never was - are there other risks here that are caused by infinite page generation?? Like burning up a theoretical "crawl budget" or having the bots miss pages or other negative consequences? 6 - Is it also possible that bumping a site that ranks well for 100 pages up to 10,000 pages or more might very well have a linkuice penalty as a result of all this (honest but inadvertent) duplicate content? In otherwords, is inbound linkjuice and ranking power essentially divided by the number of pages on a site? Sure, it may be some what mediated by internal page linkjuice, but what's are the actual big-dog issues here? So has SEL's "duplicate content myth" truly been myth-busted in this particular situation? ??? Thanks a million! 200.gif#12
Algorithm Updates | | seo_plus0 -
301 or rel con ?
OK should I use 301 or rel can for a page that has a mox authority of 50 (PR5) and some links into it? Do I do it to the home page or do I do it to the revelant page? If I rel con or 301 using a php script in the header of the page do I leave the content on the page or do I remove everything? This is in response to last friday. Do I 301 all the pages to the top 5 pages that have been getting all the traffic, or do I leave some if most of them are or marketing?
Algorithm Updates | | jdcline0 -
Google Dropped 3,000+ Pages due to 301 Moved !! Freaking Out !!
We may be the only people stupid enough to accidentally prevent the google bot from indexing our site. In our htaccess file someone recently wrote the following statement RewriteEngine On
Algorithm Updates | | David_C
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301] Its almost funny because it was a rewrite that rewrites back to itself... We found in webmaster tools that the site was not able to be indexed by the google bot due to not detecting the robots.txt file. We didn't have one before as we didn't really have much that needed to be excluded. However we have added one now for kicks really. The robots.txt file though was never the problem with regard to the bot accessing the site. Rather it was the rewrite statement above that was blocking it. We tested the site not knowing what the deal was so we went under webmaster tools then health and then selected "Fetch as Google" to have the website. This was our way of manually requesting the site be re-indexed so we could see what was happening. After doing so we clicked on status and it provided the following: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Length: 250
Content-Type: text/html
Location: http://www.mystie.com/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
MS-Author-Via: MS-FP/4.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 02:27:49 GMT
Connection: close <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> Moved Permanently The document has moved here. We changed the screwed up rewrite mistake in the htaccess file that found its way in there but now our issue is that all of our pages have been severely penalized with regard to where they are now ranking compared to just before the indecent. We are essentially freaking out because we don't know the real time consequences of this and if or how long it will take for the certain pages to regain their prior ranks. Typical pages when down anywhere between 9-40 positions on high volume search terms. So to say the least our company is already discussing the possibilities of fairly large layoffs based on what we anticipate with regard to the drop in traffic. This sucks because this is peoples lives but then again a business must make money and if you sell less you have to cut the overhead and the easiest one is payroll. I'm on a team with three other people that I work with to keep the SEO side up to snuff as much as we can and we sell high ticket items so the potential effects if Google doesn't restore matters could be significant. My question is what would you guys do? Is there any way we can contact Google about such a matter? If you can I've never seen such a thing. I'm sure the pages that are missing from the index now might make their way back in but what will there rank look like next time and with that type of rewrite has it permanently effected every page site wide, including those that are still in the index but severely effected by the index. Would love to see things bounce back quick but I don't know what to expect and neither do my counterparts. Thanks for any speculation, suggestions or insights of any kind!!!0 -
301 Redirect has removed search rankings
As per instructions from a SEO , we did a 301 redirect on our url to a new url (www.domain.com to subdomain xxxx.domain.com). But the problem is we lost all the google rankings that the previous url had gained. How can we rollback this situation. Can we retrieve the rankings of the previous url if we remove 301 permenant move redirection ? The new url does not figure in the google search for the keyword that use to fetch the previous url at no 3 in the results Please help ...
Algorithm Updates | | BizSparkSEO0