Do 301 redirects now allow most of the bad value to pass through?
-
I heard after the 3.2 update that most of your bad history passes though the 301 redirect.. What do you guys think out there?
-
Hi Matthew,
Excellent question, and one we should explore in more depth, research and write a blog post here at SEOmoz.
But the short answer is: yes. I've seen a lot of evidence in the past year that low quality backlinks pass through 301 redirects, almost as powerful as if you linked those bad links directly to the new domain.
We've seen more evidence of this lately, as Google cracks down harder on bad links, more webmasters are grumbling that that their 301s are hurting them.
Of course, the best solution to any bad redirected backlinks is to stop the 301. I've seen sites recover after doing this and heard evidence from other webmasters of this working, at least to a degree, in some situations.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
That is correct a 301 Redirect pushes all existing link equity to the new url structure. in order to prevent bad link equity to push through, do not 301 an old url to the new url.
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
-
Recently re-built our site and changed domain. Now I want to go back to old domain - it it a bad idea?
About a year ago I rebuilt our website and changed our domain name. We rent villas in Tuscany, we used to be 'invitationtotuscany.com'. Then I started doing the same in Provence, and in the italian lakes, so i had further sites called invitationtoprovence.com and invitationtotheitalianlakes.com. But maintaining them was awkward and I wanted to have one site. So I put them all onto invitationto.com and did 301s from the old domains and sites. Now I'd dropped off organic search results and I've also realised that invitationto.com is far less clear as a business address. My inclination is to go back to invitationtotuscany.com - Tuscany is still 80% of our business and have the other areas in there too - optimised for SEO for Provence etc. I'm being told its a really bad idea to change domain, 301 the old one, and then revert to the original domain. But I'm suffering anyway, so I wonder if I sjhouldn't just bite the bullet. A lot of my old good backlinks still point to invitationtotuscany.com (BBC, Sunday Times, etc) and the DA is 33 against 22 on the new one.. All help gratefully received! : )
Technical SEO | | DanWrightson0 -
Recently migrated to https version of volusion site. 301 redirect link chain question
I recently migrated to a https version of a volusion site. They have some type of internal 301 redirect method to accommodate for the entire site. I have also used the 301 redirect manager to redirect categories and pages which I have changed. The question is if I have changed a page internally in the redirect manager from say source. /bluewidget to say. target. /superbluewidget is it wiser or even possible to do it this way to reduce the redirect chain from 3 to 2 steps source. /bluewidget to. target https://www.example/superbluewidget can a relative link be targeted to a full url to reduce steps in a 301 redirect link chain. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mrkingsley0 -
301 Redirects
Hello, All. Hopefully this will be an easy question for some of you. I have a (WordPress) site with the format of: http://www.site.com/folder-old/page-old/ I have since re-named both the parent and sub-folders to (example): http://www.site.com/folder-new/page-new/ Everything is working well EXCEPT I am also trying to redirect visitors from the old URL/structure to the new. I have a 301 redirect setup as the following: Redirect 301 /folder-old/page-old/ http://www.site.com/folder-new/page-new/ -- But it doesn't seem to be working. Not sure if this is something finicky with WordPress or if the redirect is incorrect. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Max Number of 301 Redirections?
Hi, We currently made a re-design of a website and we changed all our urls to make them shorter. I made more than 300 permanent redirections but plenty more are needed since WMT is showing some more 404s from old urls that I hadn't seen because they were dynamic. The question is, please, is there a limit? I think we have more than 600 already. We don't want to create a php commando to redirect all the old ones to our home, we are redirecting them to their correspondent url. By the way, Im doing them with the 301 method in .htaccess. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Should I consolidate multiple domains to a single site with 301 redirects?
Our client wants all his sites to be re-designed and perhaps consolidated into one domain. What are the dangers of using 301s on all his already ranking and established domains to their new forward-slash location? If there are some good articles that describe this exact issue please post a link.
Technical SEO | | dsmdesign0 -
301 redirect from Blogger
Hello, I have a client with a Wordpress network of blogs, each blog is owned by a different blogger. Many of them were migrated time ago from Blogger. I have seen that the way used to redirect them is a meta refresh, so no authority is being passed. I cannot find any reliable way of making a 301 from Blogger, There are some plugins, but I'm afraid of using them. Any of you have experience with this situation please? I have even thought about placing a global rel canonical before the meta refresh, but I think that here the problem is the meta refresh itself.... Thank you in advance
Technical SEO | | Juandbbam0 -
150 products 301 redirect to HOME page, any impact?
If redirect 150 products to the home page, will I be penalize? It does not look like I can have access to cPanel on this platform, BigCommerce and i moves my old domain to this plateforme, the only option I might have his to redirect everythings to home page. Thank you, BigBlaze
Technical SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Why is a 301 redirected url still getting indexed?
We recently fixed a redirect issue in a website, and although it appears that the redirection is working fine, the url in question keeps on getting crawled, indexed and cached by google. The redirect was done a month ago, and google shows cached version of it, even for a couple of days ago. Manual checking shows that its being redirected, and also a couple of online tools i checked report a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea why this could be happening? The website I'm talking about is www.hotelmajestic.gr and its being redirected to www.hotel-majestic.gr
Technical SEO | | dim_d0