301 Redirects & Killer Rankings!

[jacker818]

I was doing some research within my niche but in different cities to check out some of their strategies and i came across a company who is ranking #1 all over google for high competition keywords.

This is what i see in Ahrefs about his site:

2.26K live back links
343 Live Referring domains

URL Rating: 42
Domain Rating: 44

Not to shabby but some of his competitors had way better metrics! Before we start commenting about PBN's and etc check this out.

What i also found strange was he had a total of 65 301 redirects to his domain! All of these 301's were domains from his exact same niche.

What are your ideas on this?

From my knowledge 301 redirects are a thing in the past and are extremely harmful to your SEO campaign.

I also looked at his back link strategy and noticed there was no tiered link building going on. On page SEO was good and he might have PBN's. Still interesting that he has 65 301's pointing directly to his domain.

 

[Unreliable Witness]

In what way are 301s a thing of the past? They are used legitimately all the time. They certainly aren't in themselves "harmful to your SEO campaign". They can be mis-used (just as a normal backlink can be), but a 301 redirect in itself isn't bad.

Having said that, it is very interesting what you have found. 301 redirects are usually a bad strategy because they distort a link profile. To have so many redirects shows that the owner of the site above is spending a lot of time vetting relevant expired domains. How many are related to his brand?

 

[jacker818]

All of them are related to his brand. Let's just say for example his site is about trash services in Texas. All the redirecting sites are about trash cleaning services in Texas. Smart move. But I feel like this is not safe at all!

 

[Rachmaninoff]

65 of 301 redirects is obviously a big footprint and yes it's harmful for the site. I got a moneysite slapped by google for using 301 redirection directly and that was like 2 years ago. I also heard from some folks here in bhw that 301 was not as great as it used to be.

 

[Go4DBest]

All the redirecting sites are about trash cleaning services in Texas. Let's just say for example his site is about trash services in Texas. All of them are related to his brand.

 

[hippo123]

I had positive results with 301 redirects. I think that if its all from the same niche, it might work as you can explain to google that you acquired all these websites.

 

[MikeyMikey13]

The way I succeed with a 301 redirect is to build a site on a related domain (keywords in domain) or buy expired.

Juice it up with some of your own links, then do a 301 pyramid.

So it goes website>bitly (or another 301 service)>ms

 

[Banditoseo]

I think the 301 game has changed. 2-3 years ago, a lot of people were slapped for it. It was common for sites to have spammy keyword-laden domains redirected to the money site, and they got clobbered by the Penguin and Payday Loan updates. It's still generally considered a dangerous strategy by most SEOs I've read, and there's empirical evidence that Google treats 301s to pages with substantially different content as a soft 404.

But over the past 6-12 months I've seen the return of 301 redirects. E.g., spammy domain names pointing to inner pages with few other external links, and Google rewarding it nonetheless.

I think something is seriously wrong with the algo these days, a large divergence from what Google claims and what the algo actually does. Maybe it's intentional, maybe not. Right now spammy crap in general is far more effective than it was over the past 2 years or so.

I have to believe it won't last forever, but AdWords revenue is up by a third since this time last year, so Google has about 2.3 billion reasons to stay on the course.

You can either be safe and grit your teeth watching them rank until the crash, whenever that may come, or start doing it yourself. Google has announced that 301s no longer produce a decay in PageRank, so you could redirect to some sort of buffer, like a URL shortener, and then redirect that to your site, although perhaps that kills the benefit, too, because the buffer isn't relevant.

 

[tokokipiani]

301 redirects would definitely hurm you website, especially if they are 65

 

[MikeyMikey13]

301 redirects would definitely hurm you website, especially if they are 65

any proof of this?

 

[tokokipiani]

any proof of this?

I can not give you exact proof, but you can test to see the results

 

[tokokipiani]

any proof of this?

But do not test it on your authority website which makes money.

 

[MikeyMikey13]

But do not test it on your authority website which makes money.

I've tested and used 301 redirects on many of my money sites and they all work just fine.

When have they not worked for you?

 

[Dwain Stewart]

301 Redirection works if you utilize it correctly. Doing one or two redirection doesn't hurt your site, if you do too many, it surely will hurt your site.

Before doing the redirection one have to make sure that domain wasn't penalized before and has a good backlink profile. I believe penalty could pass on through the redirection.

 

[anthonytn]

Good 301 is good for your site. Bad 301 is bad for your site.
From my experience, it doesn't matter how many 301 you have, if they are all good and natural 301 links under google eyes, then your site will be just fine.
Bad 301 Url are spammy 301, irrelevant 301, penalty 301, etc. They are urls with bad profiles, then when you redirect these links, they will also pass the bad thing to your site.
Having too much 301 backlinks while only have a few other backlink types can also be considered unnatural and harmful. I have site with over 150 301 redirects and thoudsands of other normal backlinks, it's ranking well for many keywords.

 

[comeoniwanna]

It depends how relevant and good the redirects themselves are.