Is domain authority lost if you create a 301 redirect but mark it as noindex, nofollow?

[jgoehring-troy]

Hi everyone,

Our company sells products in various divisions. While we've been selling Product A and Product B under our original brand, we've recently created a new division with a new domain to focus on a Product B.

The new domain has virtually no domain authority (3) while the original domain has some (37). We want customers to arrive on the new domain when they search for key search terms related to Product B instead of the pages that previously existed on our main website.

If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags?

I read a few blog posts from Moz that said there isn't any domain authority lost with 301 redirects but I'm not sure if that is true if the pages are noindex, nonofollow.   Do you follow? 

Apologies for the lengthy post. Love this community and the great Moz team.

Thanks,

Joe

[jgoehring-troy]

Thanks Mike.  How do we preserve any 'link juice' from the existing page that will have the redirect? Do the noindex and nofollow tags hurt the passing of link equity vs. just having the 301 redirect without those tags?

[MikeTek]

Hi Joe,

If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags?

If you create 301 redirects for pages on the main site, the "noindex,nofollow" tags will have no impact (bc they'll never be visible to Googlebot or other clients). The pages would have to load (200 status code) for Google to discover and make use of the Meta Robots tag or any other directive/content.

So if you're planning to create 301 redirects for these pages, I wouldn't bother with the "noindex,nofollow" tags - once Google encounters the 301 redirect they should index the new pages and remove the old pages.

One caveat: if Google detects a large disparity between the old and new pages (topic/intent is clearly different), the authority might not translate over to the new pages. We usually see this work fine, but it's something to keep in mind.

Best,
Mike