I have an old site that has a lot of good backlinks. I have abandoned that project and want to get into a new niche. I want to buy a new domain and 301 redirect the old domain to the new one. Here is the thing, I want to do this on a trial basis. If I am not happy with the result, I want to turn off the 301 redirect to the new site, and 301 redirect the old site to another site that I have. However, on another thread I read that 301 redirect can be done only once so the above will not work. Is this true?
If I understood correctly, you want to use the 301 redirect to boost your first site just temporary (to gain some boost )and then redirect the domain to your 3rd site right?
not quite. I have an old site that has a lot of backlinks. let's call this "old site" I have 2 new sites, site1 and site2. I want to 301 redirect "old site" to site1 first. If I am happy with the result (ranking of site1), then I will leave it at that. If I am not happy, I want to turn off the 301 redirect to site1 and 301 redirect "old site" to site2 instead. I thought 301 redirects are reversible and this wouldn't be a problem, but someone in another thread said you can do it only once. they were saying if you 301 redirect to site1 and then turn that off and 301 redirect to site2, it will create problems. Is that true?
Naw you can do that if you want. you set a 301 to wherever you want it to go, whenever you want it to go there. I imagine what you probably read about doing it once is you don't want to chain 301 pages ex. page1 301 redirected -> page2 301 redirected -> page3. In that case might as well 301 both to page3 directly. You write where you want each URL to redirect and you can change it whenever you want. Make sure to give it some time to see if it works. Google will probably dance for about three weeks and then settle eventually. Don't just set em for 3 days and then panic. PS. If your not happy with the redirect to site1 why would you 301 redirect to site2?
301 Redirect - permanent redirect 302 Redirect - temporary redirect When the crawler visits your site and sees a 301(Permanant) it basically tells it to never go back to that URL again and just go to where it is being redirected, where with a 302(Temporary) it tells the crawler to check back with the old site at a later time.