301 Redirect: A Review From The One Who Tried It A Few Times

By: Val Zamulin | Posted: 07th January 2006

Hi and hello to everyone interested and involved in the clandestine world of SEO matters!

Much has been said in the highly reputable places like Webmasterworld and Digital Point about this particular type of redirecting links, pagerank and most importantly anchor text value - but HOW does it actually work in reality?

I have come to a few conclusions based on a number of successful and unsuccessful redirects.

  • Case study #1 - redirecting old penalized domain to a new one:

    This has issues though - especially related to the famous SANDBOX filter for brandnew dead-in-the-water domains. However based on 4 previous experinces I came to a conclusion that this is more or less a hit and miss issue - in other words in *might* or *might not* work. Success rate is exactly 50% on that one. I am talking Google of course. Before the redirect those were brutally penalized domains that had no PR assigned despite a number of high PR one-ways and no rankings for a 4-kwd geo search even in top 500. In 2 cases out of 4 a 301 redirect did transfer all backlinks and PR and - whew! - top 10 rankings for keywords with medium competitveness. So the verdict is - a 301 redirect could be the last resort when nothing else works to get your penalized domain out of google marsches It did work with Yahoo as well but MSN still seems to be pretty stubborn with all 301's when it comes to passing rankings from an old domain to a new one. This also happens with fixing www vs. non-www issue with MSN. Definitely an issue to see to for huge Microsoft brainiacs.

  • Case Study #2 - old one to another old one:

    By "old one" I mean a domain that is at least 1.5 yrs old - in most cases a surefire symptom that your domain is out of sandbox already.

    A 100% success rate on that one as far as home page links and rankings are concerned. With internal pages it might have issues as well. Internal pages of the domain do not get back to the old rankings that the redirected domain used to have in full - this is my experience after about 4 months and about 25 cache renewals of those new pages. Some of the rankings did come back though but not nearly where they used to be (for instance #9 where it used to be #2 and so on). SE traffic to those internal landing pages decreased by about 50%. My verdict for this is - hold on to your old domains guys! I would think twice if your medium and long term online and offline marketing perspectives caused by the rebranding are worth losing a good share of your websites traffic in the short term and possibly later on. Having problems with that in MSN again but Yahoo seems to behave in the same way as Google here.

    I sincerely hope you found this information useful and perhaps managed to weigh out all pros and cons again. Please email me if you have further questions regarding all that has been said above.

    Val Zamulin is a professional online marketing consultant employed by Skynetix Software Development Company. About the Author
    Occupation: SEO
    Valery Zamulin is a professional online marketing consultant, media buyer, professional web design, logo design and web development consultant, active Webmasterworld.com member, B.Econ and B.Linguistics. His VIP clients include Logic Software - software outsourcing company, Skynetix - mobile software development company, Pingo Studio - professional logo design firm, Easy Projects - online project management tool.
    http://www.seologist.com
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    Tags: google, yahoo, msn, anchor text, conclusions, microsoft, conclusion, success rate, backlinks, case study, last resort, dead in the water