Do 301 redirects now allow most of the bad value to pass through?

[Merta1980]

I heard after the 3.2 update that most of your bad history passes though the 301 redirect.. What do you guys think out there?

[kpeacy]

That is correct a 301 Redirect pushes all existing link equity to the new url structure. in order to prevent bad link equity to push through, do not 301 an old url to the new url.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Matthew,

Excellent question, and one we should explore in more depth, research and write a blog post here at SEOmoz.

But the short answer is: yes. I've seen a lot of evidence in the past year that low quality backlinks pass through 301 redirects, almost as powerful as if you linked those bad links directly to the new domain.

We've seen more evidence of this lately, as Google cracks down harder on bad links, more webmasters are grumbling that that their 301s are hurting them.

Of course, the best solution to any bad redirected backlinks is to stop the 301. I've seen sites recover after doing this and heard evidence from other webmasters of this working, at least to a degree, in some situations.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!