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In my experience 301s will currently mess up your Google +1 Counts, Facebook Like count, Tweets, LinkedIn shares. Typically both myself and clients have learned about this the hard way, after the URL is changed and 301 is redirected. I have tried to research whether the effect is passed along but have not seen a conclusive answer. This Google Webmaster Central thread from August 2011 has more information on the subject and is worth reading: How does Google treat +1 against robots.txt, meta noindex or redirected URL: There is a response from a Google Employee that states: "Hi, The +1 Button interacts with robots.txt and other crawler directives in an interesting way. Since +1's can only be applied to public pages, we may visit your page at the time the +1 Button is clicked to verify that it is indeed public. This check ignores crawler directives. This does not, however, impact the behavior of Google web search crawlers and how they interact with your robots.txt file. The other issue you mention, of redirecting pages, can be resolved using link rel="canonical" elements on your pages. Cheers, Jenny" Her answer seems to point towards some sort of "credit" getting passed along when you use rel="canonical", but that's just my interpretation of what she says.