Do 301 redirects affect rankings in Google? Read on to see if there’s a link between 301 redirects & ranking improvements.
Good SEO practice is to use 301 redirects to let search engines know that a page has been permanently moved to a new location.
However, can a 301 redirect affect rankings in organic search?
Read on to see if there’s a link between Improving Google Rankings and 301 Redirects.
Is a 301 redirecting a ranking factor?
What is a 301 redirect?
A 301 redirect redirects a URL to a server-side address that has been permanently changed.
In the following scenarios, you will use a 301 redirect:
- You’re moving from HTTP to HTML.
- You change the old domain to the new one.
- Optimizing Slug URLs for existing pages and posts
- You move to a new web platform and your pages will be changed from https://domain.com/page.html to https://domain.com/page/.
- Most of the discussion around the 301 redirect focuses on whether PageRank will be moved to the new URL.
Also, if there are inbound links for the old URL, will they be automatically applied to the URL you’re using?
Evidence vs 301 redirects as ranking functions
Not much is officially known about 301 redirects.
At the time, Matt Cutts was the head of Google’s webspam team and stated that Google would allow an unlimited number of redirects between pages.
Google will make multiple transitions when a page is redirected from one page to another and then redirected again. He mentioned that Googlebot may stop following redirects after four to five clicks.
In 2013, Cutts stated that with 301 redirects, only a small amount of PageRank is lost. Cutts does not name the percentage, although some SEO experts claim that the loss is 15%.
Google’s John Mueller 2016 answered a question about whether 301 redirects could pass PageRank in a post titled “Moving from HTTP to HTTPS.”
He assured webmasters:
With any major change to the site, there are always several failures. While we can’t guarantee anything, our systems work well for HTTP-> HTTPS changes. «… for 301 or 30.2 redirects to HTTPS. PageRank will not be lost.
