The Danger of 301 Redirects

Mar 23

Just when you thought it was safe to use 301 redirects, Google comes out and admits but you may suffer some loss in page rank! Matt Cutts stated in a recent conference that he was unsure whether the indexing team implemented ‘any page rank decay’ coming from the use of 301 redirects. He has later confirmed that it is in fact the case. However, there is no indication as to how much a site will actually lose through using these redirects, all we know is that there will be some impact. Of course, there may not be any other solution at this stage, and it is certainly better to lose a small amount of page rank as opposed to the whole thing.