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Does PR transfer with a 301 redirect?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by pcarlow

Dani AI

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Short answer for : yes — a properly implemented 301 redirect will transfer link signals (PageRank). Google’s guidance today treats server-side permanent redirects as the right way to tell Google a URL has moved, and Google engineers have said recent 3xx behavior does not inherently “lose” PageRank the way older guidance suggested. This supports and ’s recommendation to consolidate variants (root vs. www) via 301s while echoing ’s caution that moves still need care. Google - Redirects and Google Search (searchengineland.com)

Practical checklist (safe, minimal-risk move): pick one canonical hostname, implement server-side 301s from all old variants to the chosen host, map content with 1:1 redirects when moving pages or domains, update internal links and canonical tags, submit the new sitemap, and use Search Console’s change-of-address and inspection tools for domain moves. Keep redirects in place for at least a year (indefinitely if possible). Google - How to move a site (developers.google.com)

Important caveats: avoid redirect chains (they slow crawling and add failure points — aim for a single hop where possible), do not mass-redirect unrelated old pages to your homepage (soft-404 risk), and expect short-term ranking/traffic fluctuation during a domain migration; monitor closely. Tools like Screaming Frog or other redirect-checkers help find chains and one-off problems. (developers.google.com)

Quick example (Apache .htaccess) to redirect non-www to www (one-step, permanent):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Test redirects with curl -I or online checkers, validate top URLs in Search Console, update high-value external links where you can, and leave redirects live until Search Console and analytics show the old URLs have fallen out of use. (developers.google.com)

Recommended Answers

All 5 Replies

Member Avatar for seobook

I think it does sometimes but not always... like when John Scott moved his forums to a new domain they took a bit of a hit. also 301 redirects surely will get abused a bunch more going forward. I think on same domain they should have a tendany to usually do fine but some cross domain ones might not pass their full value. I do not have much experience with 301s though

Member Avatar for ResaleBroker

...also 301 redirects surely will get abused a bunch more going forward.

Can you elaborate?

Member Avatar for jewboy

According to seobook's book, beware of 302 redirects.

Member Avatar for pcarlow

I've seen people report mixed results with using 301s. I highly recommend that you 301 redirect example.com to www.example.com on all your sites. But as far as a totally different domain, I would only do it as a last resort.

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