Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page

[Travis-W]

Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page?

For example,
SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14

I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above?

100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90%

Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site?

Thanks!

[ThompsonPaul]

In my experience, the "juice" loss is cumulative, Zora. In addition, too many 301s in a row and eventually the search engines will quit following the request. On top of that, too many redirects and you may lose the referrer information, plus each redirect slows the eventual page load.

It's very seldom necessary to chain that many redirects though. Let's say you 301-redirect page A to page B. Later page B gets removed and you now want page A and page B to point to page C. You would have to create a new redirect for B to point to C, but you would also go back to the original page A redirect and change it to also point directly to page C, thereby avoiding the double redirect.

So:

Page A 301 redirect to Page B

Page B deleted and content move to Page C

New Page B 301 redirect to Page C

Change old Page A redirect to Page C

So now A and B both point to C without A needing to go through B to get there. One hop for each.

Make sense?

Paul

[SoftzSolutions]

_If you are redirecting Site A to Site B to Site C  and finally to Site D, I it is highly unlikely that the link juice and authority of Site A will be passed onto Site D. Moreover, it will increase page loading time significantly and it is certainly not adding any value to users’ experience. If the purpose is not to lose a single visitor, you can get them redirected to final website individually.

Site A 301 to Site D
Site B 301 to Site D
Site C 301 to Site D

Let me know what you think about this. _

[Travis-W]

Thanks for the reply Paul.

I'm a little confused here: 
"Change old Page A redirect to Page C" Ideally that is what I would like to do, but is it even possible to change a 301 redirect?  I thought it was called permanent for a reason.

[ThompsonPaul]

You can certainly edit an existing 301 redirect to point to a new location, Zora. Obviously you want to do this as little as possible, but there's nothing against doing it to to fix the otherwise ridiculously long redirect chain.

The "permanent" part of a 301 is the fact that it tells the search engine to consider that the original URL's page will never be needed again and only keep track of the new URL. Whereas a 302 temporary redirect says "the original page will be coming back at some point, so keep it in the index".

Paul