301 redirect blog network to main site, good or bad?

[DanielSndstrm]

Hi,

Here is a newbie question. When we launched our web shop 18 months ago I started eight blogs on a different host with keyword rich domain names to get some links to the shop.

Today I don't update them, but they have a lot of links to our shop and the blogs have something like DA 20 and PA 30-40. There are lots of links between the blogs as well.

Can I do 301 redirects of the blogs/posts to the web shop to rank higher in the SERP for the keywords? If I do, what happens to the links from the blogs to the shop? Will the shop loose a lot of links, but gain in PA, DA, mR etc?

Overall, would the shop/main site benefit from this?

Or should I just leave the blogs and not mess with them? They don't have much traffic.

I appreciate any input, thanks!

[DanielSndstrm]

Thank you for your input Geoff!

[zigojacko]

Hi Todd,

If the blog contained valuable content but was instructed to 301 redirect to a new location, then you are correct, the crawl would not go as far as crawling the content and subsequently indexing/caching or analysing value therefore any weight the actual content possesses will not transfer via the redirect however domain/page/URL authority / link juice / PageRank and other link metrics will, not 100% of this, but most of it.

301 redirecting is not designed to directly improve rank although other benefits of 301 redirecting can lead to this. Such as usability, traffic, relevancy.

[polarking]

@Geoff , so if the blog has content in it would the301 stop the crawl and redirect it? If this is true then the content would not be crawled? I have a friend with a similar issue. He is trying to improve ranking by redirecting his old site (which has content) to his new on.

[zigojacko]

The scenario you describe...

"I started eight blogs on a different host with keyword rich domain names to get some links to the shop. Today I don't update them, but they have a lot of links to our shop and the blogs have something like DA 20 and PA 30-40. There are lots of links between the blogs as well."

...is likely to match much of the criteria Google are using to hit sites with Panda / Penguin updates, to be honest, unless the blog content is of high unique content and not 'over optimised', I would not make any efforts to associate yourself with the network of blogs as it will likely do more harm than good over the forthcoming 12 months.

Really, you need to be assessing the overall value of each blog and whether similar content on your current webshop is a good match for the content on each of the blogs. If you're just contemplating 301 redirecting to improve ranking of keywords, then it's unlikely that this will be the result.