Double 301 redirect

[steffen_]

Hi together,

due to some technical reasons I have redirect (301) an existing link two times.

Example:

www.mydomain.com/root/site.html > 301 > www.mydomain.com/site.html > 301 www.mydomain.com/site_new.html

Is there anybody how has got some experience like doing a double redirect? What about link juice?

Best regards

Steffen

[kdaly100]

I wouldn't worry too much about the double redirect but how old are the pages that you are redirecting?  Are they getting a lot of traffic?

Never seen a double re-direct before but then again I have never seen a lot of things

[RobertFisher]

Good question Bonprix. My most recent experience was with a law firm that had a previous site several years ago and 301'd and then hired a developer recently to build a new site. Due to change in url structure and menus, etc. it was necessary to 301 from the one they had to the new. I have no answer on link juice other than thinking it through a bit. If the first redirect was set up several years ago and the new one is recent, I do not think you will see to much of a loss assuming it is done correctly. Here are my suggestions:

If using a CMS, do not use an extension and instead use .htaccess file. Here is tutorial suggested in Google webmaster tools: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/howto/htaccess.html

Make sure you do a 301 for each url and not domain to domain.

I would then go into webmaster tools and let Google know which domain you prefer from a canonical point of view. Here is the link for that: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=44231

If you do all of this you should be able to capture as much of the link juice as possible.  I also noted recently that a client's developer had done a 301 redirect for the canonical and chose to redirect the www to the non www. The non had a PA of 1 for the homepage and the www had a PA of 27 for the homepage. If he had simply redirected it the opposite way, he would not be waiting or worrying about link juice. So check that rel=canon is there and check each domain for PA so that you have best outcome.

Good Luck

[steffen_]

Thank you for your answers. We have some important sites we'd like to keep link juice but due to technical reasons we need to do double redirection. Currenty I expect we will loose rankings because we are going to restructure the whole site. I will see it in a couple of days and come back with my experience...

[RobertFisher]

Make sure you do the url to url wherever possible. If you don't, you won't know in a couple of weeks based on my experience. (One of the best pieces of SEO advice ever came about that very issue. When we went back in and changed each url to 301 within days we saw DA and PA go up!). 
I look forward to hearing your progress.

Robert