What happens to (external) linkjuice after you redirect a page?

[PrizeWize]

Hope everybody is having a good day:).

I was wondering what happens to the external link juice of a page when you redirect it to a new (and improved) url?

For instance www.example.com/lowvolumesword/highvolumeword/   301 --> www.example.com/highvolumeword/

Will the /highvolumeword/ page lose a lot of  (external) linkjuice?

Is it best to change the external links to the new url manually or leave them as is and let the 301 redirect take care of it?

Is it possible to say that no more than x% of your linkjuice will be passed through via a 301?

I hope im making sense here and am looking forward to your reaction.

Thanks in advance,
Lawrence

[Dan-Lawrence]

HI Lawrence

As far as i understand it aprox 90% of the 'juice' will be preserved/passed on to the new URL

If able to change any of the external links to the new one quickly and easily then why not, to get the 100%

Thats my take on it anyway

All Best

Dan

[PrizeWize]

Hey Dan,

Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts. I agree with you 100%.

I wonder if there is anyone else who has another opinion or knows of case studies that have tested what we are thinking.

Got a lot of migration ahead of me with quite a bit of linkbuilding on the 'old' url's, so definitely want to do whats best in thiscase

[TakeshiYoung]

Matt Cutts from Google has said himself that 301s do not pass all their link value:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021832.html

As to exactly how much value is lost, only a Google engineer would know. From my experience, it's not a very big loss, probably only 10-20% at most.

[PrizeWize]

Hi Takeshi Young,

Very intersting information from pretty much the most credible source.

So if i leave the links as is i'd have a little loss of linkjuice (10/20%), If i want 100% juice to be passed along i would have to change the links targetting url to the new ones.

Does Google get 'upset' if you change existing external links? I can imagine that the 'bots' don't like existing links changing much and could consider it spam tactics.

[PrizeWize]

Hi All,

Mini update here.

Matt Cutts posted a video exactly about this issue on YouTube yesterday.

Basically he says 'PageRank' loss via 301's is a MYTH :D.

In my opinion this sounds like great news to me.

I assume i won't have to change all my external links to a new url just to save +- 10% juice

Video link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Filv4pP-1nw

Hope this info is usefull to you guys ( and gals) :),

Lawrence Shaw

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Filv4pP-1nw