301 redirects for all urls - legal dispute

[ReachMaineAgency]

The website in question is a very high traffic website with substantial  credibility in it's subject matter (sorry, can't share more details) that delivers an overwhelming majority of traffic from SEO, much of which is new visitors.

A legal dispute has resulted in both parties agreeing to forward a percentage of the total URLs to alternative websites (only 1 website for each party). All URLs for the domain will be forwarded elsewhere.

It does not make sense to me that the "sum of the parts" will be as strong once the redirects are implemented but I am looking for feedback.

It is fair to say that the alternative domains of each party are no where near as strong as the domain being "parted out."

Will the SEO juice be distributed to each domain in full? Will both parties lose out substantially?

Feel free to ask for clarifications and I'll do the best I can given the legal parameters.

Thanks.

[Hurf]

The legal wrangling aside (as this isn't something to concern ourselves with from a technical standpoint) I'd say this boils down to: If I redirect all of the established equity for one site well-established, authority site between two newly-established domains, will the new sites do as well, pro rata, as the original site?

Short answer, no.

The purpose of a 301 is to tell Search engines that the original content has been moved elsewhere. on a permanent basis. Between 2013 and early 2016, it was the case that approx 15% of PageRank was lost when using a 301. However, that is (thankfully) no longer the case *BUT **just because Google no longer imposes a penalty for 301 redirects, PageRank is only of hundreds of signals that Google uses when ranking web pages.

In a perfect world, if you create a 301 redirect from one page to another where the content remains exactly the same AND  only the URL changes, then you should see no fall off in traffic.

See: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

Even if we assume that you have evenly (and successfully) divided 100% of the links between the two sites, with each page redirect passing over 100% of the link equity (and, in this hypothetical world, each page is carrying the same level of authority), you're still dividing the overall domain authority between two sites, so, even if everything goes perfectly when you create all of the redirects, you still end up with two sites which are weaker than the original.

In reality, of course, you are unlikely to manage to pass on every drop of 'link juice' from each of the original pages, and not all pages will carry the same weight as the others (you could compare page authority in Moz and divide by overall "value" rather than number of pages but that's never going to be precise - or easy). And this is before all of the other  ranking signals come into play.

I'd suggest the best you can do here is to carefully plan and execute the separation but both parties are going to lose out here - it's now a matter of trying to lose least.

(*I like big buts and I cannot lie.)