Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?

[Visually]

For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys.

In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL.

This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.

[RobertFisher]

Keri,

You never cease to be able to recall the good stuff. Funny, its been a busy week so am just getting to some of this. Great post here, thanks.

[Visually]

Thanks guys. For the record these pages do not have back links so I am going to be using the 301 redirect.

[RobertFisher]

Very well put. (As usual) Thanks so much,

David, hopefully you will see EGOL's reply. Best of luck.

[EGOL]

Thanks Robert,

I think that this is a question of weighing an improvement in optimization against a loss of external authority (backlinks from other websites).

If these are brand new pages with no accumulated external authority then there is very little loss in redirecting and a gain in optimization.  That means DO IT NOW - before any valuable external authority accumulates.

However, if there are a lot of external links into these pages then a percentage of that accumulated authority will evaporate through the redirect.   The more powerful these pages, the greater the loss.  In this case the decision to redirect becomes more difficult.  Only google could calculate the value of the improvement in URL optimization compared to the loss of external authority.  If it was my site I would value the external authority much more than changing a url from /toys/ to /chew-toys/

So, I would give two different answers to this question based upon the characteristics of the website webpages involved.

[RobertFisher]

EGOL,

You make a great point. My question is this: David says above that: None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.

I think his assumption is that by changing the url's to something (that appears to be from his example) more query oriented and optimized he will be able to impact this. Given that and given that a 301 will transfer 90% plus of the link juice, do you think he is served in making the change?

Curious as I respect your opinions.

[KeriMorgret]

David,

Have you read Dr. Pete's post about Should I Change my URLs for SEO? He talks about this very topic.

[EGOL]

How much ranking power do you think that an optimized URL delivers to a page?  Consider that title tag is enormous, links are enormous..... URL is probably tiny tiny tiny.

Now consider that the authority that these pages carry will pass through your site.

So, if this was my site I would be asking... How much of my external linkjuice is hitting these 20 pages.  If none then I would not expect to lose very much by redirecting the pages.  But if these pages had lots of offsite assets pointing to them the URLs would have to be really fugly before I redirected them.

[RobertFisher]

David,
First, as to your last sentence, I am assuming you are redirecting 20 urls that are "not optimal" to 20 new urls that are optimized. Such that your example above is one and another would be http://www.dog.com/food to http://www.dog.com/organic-raw-dog-food, etc. for approximately 20 urls.

If these follow the best practices (301's url to url in the .htaccess file) you should have no issue with the change. Understand that if the "poor" url /toys is ranking number 8 on page 1 of Google, and you do the redirect, it does not mean that you will rank for /chew-toys in the same place. For a short while you will likely continue to rank and then likely will fall off quickly.

Your new page will gain the link juice but not the ranking of the old.

We do a lot of site redesigns to bring them to SEO and CRO standards and therefore use a lot of 301's to maintain PA and grow it. We typically see the juice move over two to three months or more in a gradual fashion. An example is a site that we transferred every url for in late Aug. had about 170 links to its home page. Two months later, when looking at the old url there were only a couple showing and the links were showing on the new. So, it will change but not overnight.

Hope this helps

[CaseyKluver]

Hi David,

From what you describe, you will have no negative effects from using 301 redirects to a new URL structure. Thats what 301's are for

Rankings may dip for maybe 3-7 days (depending on which pages are ranking, etc)  if at all, but after that you should be good.

[JoshPugh]

According to SEOMoz's article on redirection, 301 redirects DO pass on the page authority ("about 90-99%") however it will take time. This number varies depending on who you listen to, but there is evidence that it does eventually pass through Google.

Depending on how often your pages get crawled, this may take a while but if you're not going for rankings, this won't affect too much.