Ridiculous 301 Misunderstanding - Lost Link Juice Forever

splishsplash

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Why do so many people think a "301 redirect", ie "permanent redirect" means that the domain PERMANENTLY passes all link juice to whatever it points, like it's a cup of juice and it's just emptied it?

How many people actually believe this and where did this nonsense come from?

A "permanent redirect" is a TECHNICAL term, folks. When you do a 301 redirect you're saying that it's not going to change back. A 302, a temporary redirect, which means you plan on using it temporarily. None of this has anything to do with SEO or link juice. These are ancient HTTP web server status codes.

I would just like to clear this up now and hope as many people as possible understand this.

A 301 is only transferring link power for the duration of that 301 being active. Once it's removed, the power remains on the original domain. There's no "permanent passing of link juice".
 
Thanks for explaining how that works, I'm sure it will clear up a lot of confusion for many people here. :)
 
Yea after experiencing this first hand I have been cautioning people against using 301, but since it’s come from you I’m sure people will pay more attention to it
 
Yea after experiencing this first hand I have been cautioning people against using 301, but since it’s come from you I’m sure people will pay more attention to it

I'm saying 301's don't permanently cause lost link juice.

If you link A -> B, then A->C, C still get juice. There's absolutely no reason why a 301 would cause a domain to lose all its power forever.
 
Obvious. Site A passes all the juice to site B for 6-12 months (sometimes less sometimes more). Try after that to remove the 301 and use the site A for site C and u will see if you will receive link juice again! I know is not permanent, but tell everyone that after 301 ends the original site will have the previous same link juice is BIG error.
 
Ultimately the power of a domain consists of the backlinks that are pointing to that domain. So if domain A has a link from bbc.co.uk and you 301 domain A to domain B then domain B effectively has a link from bbc.co.uk.
If you remove that 301, then the link from bbc.co.uk is once again pointing to domain A. There is no lasting benefit for domain B and nothing lost for Domain A.
 
This thread is not correct and you're going to be LOSING "link juice" (page rank) by using a 302 instead of a 301 as 302's lose pagerank over time.

301 = permanent content relocation, where content is considered "moved" and will not move again. (But does not mean you can't change the 301 at a later date...)

302 = temporary redirect that will be undone at any moment, google does not pass as much page rank through the 302 as they expect it to change. They are commonly used for ecommerce sites during seasonal sales.

This thread is complete misinformation.
 
A 301 is only transferring link power for the duration of that 301 being active. Once it's removed, the power remains on the original domain. There's no "permanent passing of link juice".

Not sure I understand.

I buy domain A because it has some nice backlinks. I also own Site B, my money site. I do a 301 redirect from Site A to Site B. Now Site B effectively is getting the backlinks of Site A. Correct? I keep Site A indefinitely, with the 301 redirect to Site B, why wouldn't the "juice" from Site A backlinks remain in effect for Site B, indefinitely?

I don't use 301 redirects for SEO, but my understanding of the technique is that you *don't* ever remove the 301 redirect. Do people do that? What would be the point of ever removing the 301?

Not arguing, just looking for clarification.


 
Why would anybody think 301ing a domain would permanently pass the SEO even after removing the 301? Surely there can't be people that think that.
 
This thread is not correct and you're going to be LOSING "link juice" (page rank) by using a 302 instead of a 301 as 302's lose pagerank over time.

301 = permanent content relocation, where content is considered "moved" and will not move again. (But does not mean you can't change the 301 at a later date...)

302 = temporary redirect that will be undone at any moment, google does not pass as much page rank through the 302 as they expect it to change. They are commonly used for ecommerce sites during seasonal sales.

This thread is complete misinformation.

My understanding is that this used to be the case, however, Gary Illyes has mentioned that this is no longer the case, and that 302 redirects no longer result in dilution.
 
In my experience, it takes almost 6-8 months for 301 links to slowly disappear, for one domain even after a year I'm still seeing new links in Ahrefs even that domain as redirect was removed a year ago. So I would say you lose 1.5 years to get link juice back :)
 
Why do so many people think a "301 redirect", ie "permanent redirect" means that the domain PERMANENTLY passes all link juice to whatever it points, like it's a cup of juice and it's just emptied it?

How many people actually believe this and where did this nonsense come from?

A "permanent redirect" is a TECHNICAL term, folks. When you do a 301 redirect you're saying that it's not going to change back. A 302, a temporary redirect, which means you plan on using it temporarily. None of this has anything to do with SEO or link juice. These are ancient HTTP web server status codes.

I would just like to clear this up now and hope as many people as possible understand this.

A 301 is only transferring link power for the duration of that 301 being active. Once it's removed, the power remains on the original domain. There's no "permanent passing of link juice".


Do people actually believe that it is permanent ie forever and ever even after it's removed if it's removed? Oh Lordy!! But great you have pointed it out. Hopefully will help some people along the way.
 
Let's say I buy a powerful auction domain for about 1.5k-3.5k $ in the same niche that I want to launch my project in but I would rather have a different name for branding, despite the auction domain being high quality. Should I forget about rebranding to a brand name that is more catchy? What is my best option?

1. Start my site on the auction domain
2. Start my site on the domain I really want and permanently 301 the auction domain to my fresh .com domain

I feel like option 1 is more certain to yield success. I'm fine with wasting the 301 power and receive not benefits, but what I don't want is to jeopardize the project long term. Thoughts?
 
In an ideal world if you ask me ... if you 301 something for your own site because you have changed structure / moved the page / redesigned or what ever it may be.. you should reach out to all the places you are getting that "link juice" from and ask them to update the article and or link with the new page at least for the links you care about..
 
This thread is not correct and you're going to be LOSING "link juice" (page rank) by using a 302 instead of a 301 as 302's lose pagerank over time.

301 = permanent content relocation, where content is considered "moved" and will not move again. (But does not mean you can't change the 301 at a later date...)

302 = temporary redirect that will be undone at any moment, google does not pass as much page rank through the 302 as they expect it to change. They are commonly used for ecommerce sites during seasonal sales.

This thread is complete misinformation.


No it's not misinformation. You just skimmed the thread and decided to post.

The post is saying that a 301 does NOT permanently transfer link juice from site A to site B. Some people think once you have 301'd, the original domain is useless. I am saying this is nonsense and that 301 and 302 are ancient HTTP status codes that have been around since before Google. The word "permanent" has nothing to do with juice being permanently transferred.

What you said is exactly the point. You CAN change a 301 at any point.


Not sure I understand.

I buy domain A because it has some nice backlinks. I also own Site B, my money site. I do a 301 redirect from Site A to Site B. Now Site B effectively is getting the backlinks of Site A. Correct? I keep Site A indefinitely, with the 301 redirect to Site B, why wouldn't the "juice" from Site A backlinks remain in effect for Site B, indefinitely?

I don't use 301 redirects for SEO, but my understanding of the technique is that you *don't* ever remove the 301 redirect. Do people do that? What would be the point of ever removing the 301?

Not arguing, just looking for clarification.




It does remain in effect as long as the 301 is in place. But some people think when you remove a 301, that site A is dead, and has no juice left.


Let's say I buy a powerful auction domain for about 1.5k-3.5k $ in the same niche that I want to launch my project in but I would rather have a different name for branding, despite the auction domain being high quality. Should I forget about rebranding to a brand name that is more catchy? What is my best option?

1. Start my site on the auction domain
2. Start my site on the domain I really want and permanently 301 the auction domain to my fresh .com domain

I feel like option 1 is more certain to yield success. I'm fine with wasting the 301 power and receive not benefits, but what I don't want is to jeopardize the project long term. Thoughts?


Always use the auction domain. Unless it's got some ridiculous name that makes it completely unbrandable. A 301 is nowhere near as powerful as actually building on the site its self.

In my experience, it takes almost 6-8 months for 301 links to slowly disappear, for one domain even after a year I'm still seeing new links in Ahrefs even that domain as redirect was removed a year ago. So I would say you lose 1.5 years to get link juice back :)

Ahrefs isn't Google :) You can't base what Google is doing from anything in ahrefs. Ahrefs only lets you see backlinks, but its behavior is not tied in any way to google's

You definitely do not lose 1.5 years. As soon as you 301 to a new site, the juice is transferred to that. It doesn't matter what shows up in ahrefs.

As soon as google crawls site A and sees a new 301, then that juice is passed to the new site.

What's not certain is the timeframe after the 301 is undone that site B stops getting the juice. Same with a link. If you remove a link you still get the benefit for at least 1-6 months depending on how long it was in place.
 
Always use the auction domain. Unless it's got some ridiculous name that makes it completely unbrandable. A 301 is nowhere near as powerful as actually building on the site its self.

Thanks! That is what I thought was the best way to handle it.

But in my case I have an upcoming SEO project where I plan HQ niche edits & guest blogs. I thought about adding a 301 from a HQ domain in the mix. I'm fine with wasting power because I'm pretty set on the name of the project that I _really_ want. 6 letter .com domain with great branding potential.

If I keep the 301 at one niche relevant domain and make sure it is spam free, how much higher are the risks in comparison to all other link building?
 
Thanks! That is what I thought was the best way to handle it.

But in my case I have an upcoming SEO project where I plan HQ niche edits & guest blogs. I thought about adding a 301 from a HQ domain in the mix. I'm fine with wasting power because I'm pretty set on the name of the project that I _really_ want. 6 letter .com domain with great branding potential.

If I keep the 301 at one niche relevant domain and make sure it is spam free, how much higher are the risks in comparison to all other link building?

You're far better off starting an SEO project with pbns.

Guest posts are more to scale, since you can't be adding endless pbns.

10 to 15 pbns is fine for any project. You're never in a million years going to get deindexed for having 15 private pbns. 10-15 for projects you're a little more risk-averse to, 25-35 for ones you're not, but you still won't have any problems with 35 private pbns out of 1000's of links. People only have problems when they have 100's of public pbns.

10 to 15 is plenty too, because you can get yourself 15 $1000 domains. Minimum $300 domains, but the stronger the better, because you only have a few spots.

A private pbn also looks totally different.

You'd create 3000-5000 words minimum on each site. If you spend $1000 on a domain, you can easily spend another $200 on content, which at $2/100 would get you 10k words. They will NOT look like pbns. You have a domain that was about say tech security, and you write 10k words about tech security topics, then you add a money article, also about tech security, linking to your money site with a long partial or lsi and you have a completely safe, super powerful pbn that will easily pass manual review.

Where guest posts come into play is after you've created those 15 pbns and you have more money to spend on seo, so you start adding guest posts of which there is no upper limit. But, a $1000 + $200 content pbn will get you 5-10x the results of a $1200 guest post.

You can also boost your guest posts with $100-$200 pbns for extra power. :)
 
You're far better off starting an SEO project with pbns.

Guest posts are more to scale, since you can't be adding endless pbns.

10 to 15 pbns is fine for any project. You're never in a million years going to get deindexed for having 15 private pbns. 10-15 for projects you're a little more risk-averse to, 25-35 for ones you're not, but you still won't have any problems with 35 private pbns out of 1000's of links. People only have problems when they have 100's of public pbns.

10 to 15 is plenty too, because you can get yourself 15 $1000 domains. Minimum $300 domains, but the stronger the better, because you only have a few spots.

A private pbn also looks totally different.

You'd create 3000-5000 words minimum on each site. If you spend $1000 on a domain, you can easily spend another $200 on content, which at $2/100 would get you 10k words. They will NOT look like pbns. You have a domain that was about say tech security, and you write 10k words about tech security topics, then you add a money article, also about tech security, linking to your money site with a long partial or lsi and you have a completely safe, super powerful pbn that will easily pass manual review.

Where guest posts come into play is after you've created those 15 pbns and you have more money to spend on seo, so you start adding guest posts of which there is no upper limit. But, a $1000 + $200 content pbn will get you 5-10x the results of a $1200 guest post.

You can also boost your guest posts with $100-$200 pbns for extra power. :)

Thank you! I really appreciate your detailed response.
 
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