Redirect between domains: any real number on how much link juice is lost?

[SandraMoZ]

Hi,

I'm thinking of rebranding my website and moving it to a new domain.

Of course I would implement 301 redirects page to page from old-domain.com to new-domain.com. I wonder if you have any real figure based on your experiments on how much link juice I could lose in the process and if it will take time for Google to re-crawl correctly the new page.

I could get some of the backlinks changed as well, so they would point to the new domain. Cutts says it would get changed at least the more important, but how many? which are the more important?

Also, what about if I move just a part of the website that has no backlinks? Supposedly it won't have any link juice to pass through but of course all the pages will be hosted on a brand new domain that won't pass domain-power to those internal pages, so will I lose rankings for these pages?

Thanks for any help,

Best regards

[EricaMcGillivray]

How you phrased your question, I thought you were considering only moving pages that didn't have any backlinks, not the entire subfolder. You want to keep your URLs consistent, and it's pretty easy to build 301 redirects around an entire subfolder.

[SandraMoZ]

Thanks Erica, sounds reasonable.

I had seen that article, but just one experiment doesn't make it absolutely true.

I wonder why you said: "you want to move all of it".  Why not moving just an entire subfolder ? Do you think could it harm rankings for the entire site or the part that has moved won't inherit link juice?

Thanks again,

[EricaMcGillivray]

301 is the best solution possible for moving your site to pass along your linkjuice. And you want to move all of it, not just pages with backlinks.

Many people have asserted that you can see up to a 10% dip initially. (Most people only see dips from a week to a month at most.) However, over the long-term, with a better site & URL structure, you should see a rise in traffic. I have no seen anyone doing a predictive modle on this.

Seer Interactive did this test 301 Redirect Test: How Much Link Juice are YOU Losing? which saw no rankings lost, but favorable outcomes in the long-term for the better site.

While I'd never put words in Cutts' mouth, I believe he was saying that if you can, getting your backlinks changed to your new site's URL is optimal. But obviously, this is not always possible. Instead, I'd concentrate on link building new links to your website on its new URL. (One should always be working on getting back links as part of your on-going SEO anyway.)