Do 301 Redirects Pass Penalties Or Not?

alvin.orrt said:

Do 301 Redirects Pass Penalties Or Not?

Some people say a 301 will pass the penalty, some say it won't.
In my mind, if it does pass a penalty, you could easily buy an expired penalized domain and redirect it to your competitor. So to keep the serps safe from negative seo, a 301 should not pass on the penalty. But that's just my own logic.

What do you guys think (or know)? Any experiences with this (in 2015 - coz i have seen threads from 2012-2013 but they're no longer valid, a lot has changed since then)? I have checked a few threads here where people said 301's are good for churn and burn - but no one ever said anything about getting a penalty.

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ILearnSEO said:

never test it on my own skin, but from reading in past few years almost everyone says that 301 pass everything including penalty.

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archon10 said:

301 redirect passes link penalties. It's because you're forwarding PR.

It is, however, perfectly OK to say "I want to do over on my domain" and improve content on another one. In this case, you would 301 redirect pages. If the quality of content is better and you've made a better site, a 301 redirect wouldn't pass, let's say, Panda issues because you've now improved your site and redirected to a better quality page.

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aashish_1792 said:

How sure are you ? Do you have any personal experiences ?

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archon10 said:

I've looked at thousands of sites, and I'm not exaggerating that number.
I know things from an entirely different angle than anyone else at bhw.

Anyway, yes, I am 100% sure. 301 redirect is a way to forward PR, so it does indeed redirect a penalty.
But, again, it is perfectly OK to decide that you want to create a new domain or improve quality of your site. The proper way to do it would be to create your new site or your new pages and then 301 redirect the old pages. This would, of course, assume that you did indeed improve.

One way to "fix" panda issues is to remove low quality pages or just improve them. You then 301 redirect the low quality page to the improved one to let Google know that they are related.

What most people do is throw up a brand new site with the same content and then cry because Google didn't give them a better rank. It doesn't work like that. You've basically thrown up a duplicate site with the same content, so obviously you're results aren't going to be spectacular.

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archon10 said:

I've looked at thousands of sites, and I'm not exaggerating that number.
I know things from an entirely different angle than anyone else at bhw.

Anyway, yes, I am 100% sure. 301 redirect is a way to forward PR, so it does indeed redirect a penalty.
But, again, it is perfectly OK to decide that you want to create a new domain or improve quality of your site. The proper way to do it would be to create your new site or your new pages and then 301 redirect the old pages. This would, of course, assume that you did indeed improve.

One way to "fix" panda issues is to remove low quality pages or just improve them. You then 301 redirect the low quality page to the improved one to let Google know that they are related.

What most people do is throw up a brand new site with the same content and then cry because Google didn't give them a better rank. It doesn't work like that. You've basically thrown up a duplicate site with the same content, so obviously you're results aren't going to be spectacular.

Click to expand...