Link reclamation and many 301 redirect to one URL

[vtmoz]

We have many incoming links to a non existing pages of a sub-domain, which we are planning to take down or redirect to a sub-directory. But we are not ready to loose pagerank or link juice as many links of this sub-domain are referred from different external links. It's going to be double redirect obviously. What is the best thing we can go to reclaim these links without loss of link juice or PR?

Can we redirect all these links to same sub-domain and redirect the same sub-domain to sub-directory? Will this double redirect works?

Or

Can we redirect all these links to same sub-domain and ask visitors to visit sub-directory, manual redirection? How fair to manually redirect visitors?

Any other options?

Thanks,

Satish

[seanginnaw]

Hey Satish,

Historically, updating redirects by amending the URL at their source DID pass on SEO value as each redirect chain caused a link to lose a small portion of equity.

A few weeks ago, Google announced that this is no longer the case and 301 redirects DON'T lose any equity any longer. This update now means that webmasters no longer have to spend time updating links at their source, rendering the practice of outreach pretty much redundant.

You can check out the blog here - https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

In short, I wouldn't bother with any outreaching as it'll provide zero SEO benefit.

All the best,
Sean

[vtmoz]

Hi Sean,

My doubt is: If we redirect all incoming links to one page; do Google penalise? What's the best way to reclaim the incoming links pointing to non-existing pages? We have redirected some links and dropped in rankings?

[seanginnaw]

Hi,

No, they shouldn't penalise. A lot of companies are bought out by bigger companies and then only have 1 page on a new domain to redirect all of their pages to. I would say that there would be little to no chance of any penalisation.

All the best,
Sean