Do social signals pass through a 301 redirect?

[SEOmoxy]

Does value from social signals have the ability to pass through a 301 redirect?

[KaneJamison]

We know that when you change the permalink structure of a site, that page loses it's "button count" for Facebook likes, Tweets, and LinkedIn shares. The Facebook opengraph doesn't currently support any sort of URL changes, regardless of redirects in place on the site itself.

It is very hard to say whether or not Google has implemented the ability to (A) detect a 301 redirect, (B) check the opengraph stats for that former URL (since they can't check twitter or linkedin to my knowledge), and (C) apply those stats to the new URL. This is essentially the process that they'd have to go through in order to pass any value from social likes, etc.

I haven't seen any testing that would suggest either way. My hunch is that they don't.

[bimmer540]

I recently 301 redirected an old domain to a new domain...

Facebook:
Unfortunately, Facebook Likes don't pass through.  I have read a few articles that recommend editing the meta property og:url to the old URL, as well as changing the data_href on the Like button to the old URL.  But I haven't seen it work, and the Facebook Object Debugger throws an error.

Google+
The +1's from the old domain did transfer to my new domain.  I can tell that the +1 counter didn't start from 0 again, plus, since I +1'd a couple of my own pages last year on the old domain, I can see those +1's in my Google+ profile.  It shows me that I did indeed +1 pages on the old domain last year, and if I go to those pages on the new domain now, the +1 button is red and lets me know that I publicly +1 it.  It looks like those transfer just fine.

So Google+ share counts seem to transfer, but not FB Likes.  Is there a way that Google can know a page on the old domain has a lot of FB likes, and even though the count doesn't transfer to the new domain, they use the old domain social signal and pass its authority to the new domain?  The more I think about it, probably.

My old domain had importance, and soon after the 301 my new domain seemed to reap a lot of the old domains value.  Even if Google can't pull up my old FB Like count in the same way that I can't, there's probably still a social signal value that Google has stored.

So the more I think about this, even though my FB Like Count for a specific page went from 2000 Likes on the old URL to 0 Likes on the new URL, I think Google still passed that authority to the new URL.  I don't have hard facts, just what I've observed.  I do wish I could get my old Like Counts back though.

[KaneJamison]

Hi Bimmer,

Thanks a lot for reporting your results.

I agree that it is easy for Google to figure out that if Page A 301 redirects to Page B (regardless of which domain each page is on), they can look up the Opengraph counts for both the old Page A and the new Page B and pass the value to Page B.

They just haven't publicly acknowledged doing so. That said, Google is a data monster, and OG is open. There's no chance on earth they're not trying to make the most of whatever of that data they can touch.

In regards to people changing the OG:url property, I know that there is a way to do that, but, I personally would prefer any new likes to apply to the new domain, and not to an old URL. If Google comes out and says they're passing social value of 301s, then I might reconsider that belief.

Thanks again for your feedback, very helpful!