URL redirect question

[A_Q]

Hi all,

Just wondering whether anybody has experience of CMSs that do a double redirect and what affect that has on rankings.

here's the example

/page.htm is 301 redirected to /page.html which is 301 redirected to /page

As Google has stated that 301 redirects pass on benefits to the new page, would a double redirect do the same?

Looking forward to hearing your views.

[AlanMosley]

15% is in the original algorithm, it may have changed but I doubt if much, if you read the algorithm its a pretty well thought out figure of decay.

I have seen the video and it is not very clear at all, maybe on purpose.

What he says is that a 301 loses as much PR as a link, I agree. all requests lose 15%,

You can't have a 301 without first going though a link. I think where people are getting confused is they think a 301 replaces a link request, it dose not, it is an extra request.

If you read the comments of the video and much discussion around the web you will see what I mean.

[zeepartner]

hmm, is there a source for the 15% statement? I never found anything clear about it, but here matt cutts seems to say that the pagerank dilution is a myth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Filv4pP-1nw

[AlanMosley]

That's not what Google said, they said that a 301 redirect loses as much as a link, from the original algorithm that was 15%

so you have link to page.htm you loose 15%

it is then redirected to page.html, loose 15% of what left

it is then 301 redirected to page again loose 15% of what is left.

You are making 3 requests each loses 15%

With Bing they will only pass link juice though 1 redirect

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-redirection-response-results-in-another-redirection

[MickEdwards]

I look at it like this -

1. Redirects are an overhead and mass redirects with redirects are inefficient.

2. Absolute pure link value is not passed on so further redirects have a little more clouding effect.

3. Bad housekeeping.  Imagine the root htaccess has a redirect to a URL that is redirected in a sub-directory.  It starts to be rather messy.

[zeepartner]

ah okay, then i wouldn't worry about it too much. two 301s is definitely no problem.

[A_Q]

Thanks Philipp, we haven't done it by choice - it is a CMS quirk unfortunately.

[zeepartner]

two redirects are no problem, though you could redirect both these pages to the final /page instead of going through the intermediary /page.html

here is matt cutts about how many 301 you can chain together: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA