Will this get penalized by google?

[adriandg]

I had a thought recently, and perhaps it is a pretty bad thought, but i don't see the flaw in it, or how google would really detect it, so please correct me where I am wrong here.

Say we ran some sort of marketing campeign and through that campeign we created about 100 extra pages on our domain.   A lot of these pages are heavily shared on facebook, twitter, google+ etc.  These pages also have several backlinks here and there. Now this campaign is over and so these pages no longer seem relevant to us.

If we were to add 301 redirects to all these pages, to three different (and unrelated) internal pages (our primary targets) would this pass all the accumulated link juice on to those three target internal pages?

Or would this behaviour get penalized by google?

[PhilNottingham]

I'm assuming this is a hypothetical question, but if not, I would be interested to know how you managed to get 100 pages heavily shared around the same marketing campaign!

It's difficult to make a conclusive judgement on this without knowing how you intend/how you have built all the links and social shares across 100 new pages on your site, but i'd think your main risk of penalisation is in redirecting a large number of pages all to the same location simultaneously, rather than in redirecting to something unrelated. I think you're unlikely to incur a major penalty doing this, but more of a risk will be that it might not do you any good.

If you are auto-generating all of your social responses, this is going to be relatively clear to Google; as those social profiles will likely be lacking in the "real human" signals, which are relatively easy to pick out, and may therefore be discounted anyway. Plus, there isn't (as far as i am aware) any decent study which shows how Google treat social shares following a redirect once the sharing has died out.

While a redirect may pass some link juice for you to the specific pages you want ranking, I can't quite understand the advantage of doing this rather than leaving the high value pages in place to build domain strength and continue to accrue social signals. You could instead put a few internal links on your high value pages to point at the targets you want to rank.

[JamesNorquay]

Depends how old the domain is imo, if your site is new and you try a large scale 301 redirect project, yes you may have some issues from past experience, with testing this.

Yet if you have an established brand and you do 100 redirects it will not be a huge deal in the eyes of Google, I have tested that many times.