Effect of 301 redirect to a relative url to homepage?

[sixspokemedia]

One of our new clients recently encountered a site-wide ranking drop for many keywords and I'm pretty confident regarding their link profile as to being 98% legit.

Background:

1. Client full site is https, and all http pages are 301 redirected to their https counterpart

2. Client has ~50 links partners (all legitimate sites + schools etc) links to client with urls such as www.example.com/portal/123.aspx that redirects to www.example.com.

3. Client homepage 301 redirects from www.example.com to www.example.com/default.aspx and then 301 redirects to the relative url "/Home.aspx".

4. Client launched some testing with Google website optimizer tool. ~1-2 months ago.

Symptoms:

1. Rankings dropped for basically many/all 30-40+ keywords by ~15 positions

2. Seomoz reports close to a double of existing pages +  (600+) duplicate content in the same date range. Webmasters only report 80 duplicate titles though.

3. Domain authority by seomoz reduced a bit + backlinks recorded by seomoz to the website nearly halved in the past 2 months.

I'm not sure if I narrowed this towards the right direction, and it isn't clear when the relative url 301 redirect was implemented:

1. The 301 redirect to the relative page (www.example.com/default.aspx to "/home.aspx") is accounting for the loss of links recorded by seomoz.

2. The ~50 links the client currently use (www.example.com/portal.123.aspx 301 redirecting to www.example.com, also relative) as a tracking tool is being considered 301 redirect abuse.

3. Maybe something went wrong with the usage of google optimizer tool for SEO purposes? Visitor traffic to each of the tested pages looked fine.

I would greatly appreciate any advice/insights on what I might be missing in terms of direction / factors.

Thanks!

Alex

[Audiohype]

Hi Alex,

From the looks of it, there seems to be a lot of 301 redirects going around. As far as I am aware 301 redirects dont always pass 100% of the weight accross to the new URLs. There is some sort of decay factor involved.

There also seems to be the case of the main links to the site passing through two 301 redirects. This is possibly one of the causes of drop in site strength.

What may be worth considering is checking how many links point to the main URL, rather than links into the redirected URLs.

Was the site fine before the 301 redirects were implemented?

Ben