301 Redirects?

[TimHolmes]

Hello fello Mozzers,

I have just read a post about 301 redirects on the Blog. A great read and has provided me with a bit more insight and highlights what could be a potential issue for a managed site I look after.

On this website I manage, I have inherited a .htaccess file with literally hundreds of non file based existant 301 links.

e.g. redirect 301 /dealerbrandname http://www.domain.com/

So we have lots of dealers and they place a link on there site to http://www.domain.com/dealerbrandname

We then redirect it to the homepage or a relevant topic page along with some tracking variables. Is this likely causing significant issues, based on the post I read I imagine it will be, but anymore thoughts on this would be hugely helpful.

CheersTim

[Highland]

It would be best if http://www.domain.com/dealerbrandname were a real page and not simply a redirect (you're getting natural link juice to it after all) but I can't think of any issues in bouncing them to some deeper page.

Can you elaborate on what this blog said to make you think your current setup is bad?

[TimHolmes]

Hi Highland.

This was the article in question - http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

And this was the statement that made me worry as we have numerous dealer redirects doing this kind of action. Unless I am interpreting it wrongly.

_Savvy SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s, or soft 404s at best. _

This means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity at all.

Cheers - Tim

[Highland]

I think he's talking about the tactic of removing pages and simply issuing a 301 back to the homepage. That tactic is indeed devalued. If you're 301ing to a page that's on-topic it's not as bad. In this case, you're not trying to keep PR, just bounce. Remember, also, that a 301 is not perfect. It might not transfer all the link juice through.

As I said before, it's ideal if you had content on the URLs they're actually linking to. From an SEO standpoint, that's gold. Dealers link to a page on your site with unique content (hopefully they're nofollowing these links). Google eats that kind of stuff up.