301 redirect usage

[bele]

I just wondering if using a lot of 301 redirects could hurt to my seo?

We have site which have a lot  of content with such links:

title: This Is Title page

url: www.site.com/This-Is-Title-page.html  and we use for each page 301 redirect to remove capital letters in url: www.site.com/this-is-title-page.html

Is this is good idea and not hurting to seo ?

Thanks in advance

[jasmin28]

As Matt Cutts stated in this video it will not hurt at all your 301 readirects. Not the amount of the redirects is important (if done correctly).

Instead, they don't like redirects of redirects (A - B, B- C, C-D and so on).

Be sure so to make the redirects from your .htaccess, update the canonical URLs (if you use 'em), your internal BL and that's it.

Cheers.

[intSchools]

You will be losing around 5-10% of your link juice by using 301 redirects. 301 redirects really should be used for when content has been moved and not for aesthetically enhancing your URLs. You need to think whether of not it is worth losing up to 10% of link juice to just remove capital letters - is there not another solution?

Hope this helps!

[bele]

Yes, there is other solution to avoid those redirections. I just wanted to be sure.

Also one thing regarding 301 redirection for root domain site.com redirect to www.site.com also not good idea? As we'll be loosing 5-10% of juice? In many webmaster forums it's advisable to use such redirection to avoid dublicates. So what would be best choice for that? Use or not to use ?

[intSchools]

That's correct - having both www.site.com and just site.com causes duplication issues.

You do not need to have redirects in place to solve this though - you can use a rel=canonical tag in order to specify which 'version' you wish search engines to use.

Here are a few posts that should help you:

Google's Explanation -

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

SEOmoz Best Practices -

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

John Doherty's blog post - "Should I use a Rel=Canonical or 301 Redirect?" -

http://www.johnfdoherty.com/relcanonical-301-redirect/