The crawl by Googlebot will be more efficient if it can go directly to the destination page rather than having to go trough a redirection.

There is some discussion whether 3xx redirections do have an impact on page rank / page authority - Google official point of view is that it doesn't.

Redirects do however indicate have an impact on speed (check here: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/mobile: "we strongly encourage webmasters to minimize the number, and ideally eliminate redirects entirely" - context is mobile but is applicable on all redirects) - but again for most sites this won't make a huge difference on total load time.

I doubt that simply cleaning your site and removing the 301 will give a boost to your search traffic, but it just something you need to from time to time (idem for internal 4xx errors) to improve the general health of your site.

Dirk

PS I am a bit puzzled about the remark "auto redirects" - you must make sure if you redirect that you redirect to a page which is similar to the page that has disappeared. Google considers most other type of redirects as "soft 404". If the page never existed - like domain.com/kklfjklgjkldfjg - it should return 404 and not be redirect.

The answer from Kristen is correct. However changing 404 to 410 will just let these pages appearing as 410 in the Search Console. The fact that they are appearing is not a problem - it's just that Google wants to notify you that pages return a 4xx status. If this is intended (like in your case) you can just ignore these messages and mark them as fixed.

In your case you could as well consider another option - remove the pages from the listings but keep them published (with status 200). Update the page, indicating that the original property is sold but list some other (similar) properties as an alternative. This way, if there are external pages linking to the property page the link value doesn't get lost and if people would accidentally land on this page they still find content which could be interesting to them (as you remove the navigation links to these pages they become orphans - so little change that they will rank very high in Google)

Dirk

Hi Satish,

Not sure if I fully understand your answer.

Google will consider a redirect as a soft 404 if you redirect pages to non-related pages. Example: if you redirect a page about "shirts" to a page about "pants" or if you redirect this page to your homepage. If the pages are similar (example "green shirts" to "shirts") it's not considered as a soft 404. I understand that you are redirecting to similar pages - so that should be ok.

If you have pages with low quality incoming links (or a mix of high/low quality links) you can still redirect them - but in case of low quality links it's probably a good idea to disavow them (using the search console) - check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

From what I read it looks similar to these cases - https://moz.com/community/q/getting-different-search-queries-in-google-webmaster & http://moz.com/community/q/chinese-site-ranking-for-our-brand-name-possible-hack

In these cases - sites where hacked using a vulnerability in a Wordpress slider - they copied sites they wanted to target on to some of the hacked domains and used other hacked domains to point links to them. At that point they were trying to redirect traffic from genuine e-commerce sites to bogus ones.

You could try to contact the site owners & tell them they have been hacked. At the same time file a complaint @Google 

rgds,

Dirk