Your thoughts on 301 and negative SEO?

Some say that 301 redirects carry penalties too.
But wouldn't that be mega abusable for Negative SEO?

Most of the time, Google already knows those domains are spam and handles it before it ever affects you. It's rarely as effective as the attacker hopes. The toxic links get devalued or treated as a soft 404, and the redirect just gets ignored.

If penalties are perfectly carried out with 301 redirects, negative SEO would be Google's simplest way to rank.
What I think: while 301s are capable of conveying worth and intention, Google is intelligent enough to stop redirects being used as an instrument to attack opponents. Are we talking though about old domains or negative SEO

Google tracks people from bedroom to office and way back home. They know your footprints more than you can think. They usually ignore negative SEO unless a footprint leads the spam entity back to you. So, it's not easy to attack someone with negative SEO unless you have access to a property related to author, brand, or website.

serpsystems said:

Some say that 301 redirects carry penalties too.
But wouldn't that be mega abusable for Negative SEO?

Click to expand...

Google are aware that this could be a route to neg seo, but they say little about it (this is probably the most recent public stance on it). While I don't have a documented case with data to prove anything, it's likely the 301 will be ignored, especially if it's going to a completely unrelated website (casino spam -> lake district B&B). A wildcard 301 to root will be the weakest, whereas replicating the site's entire path structure would give a much bigger footprint.

I think the only real danger with a 301 neg seo attempt would be if it's done towards a site that is already dealing with a manual action, as that would add another hurdle to get over in the reconsideration request.

Exactly. If 301 redirects could directly cause penalties, they’d be an easy target for negative SEO. Google usually looks at the destination site and the overall context instead of automatically penalizing a site just because a bad domain was redirected to it.

I don't think 301s are inherently a penalty. The bigger issue is how they're used and whether the redirected domain has a clean, relevant history.

If any random domain could simply 301 thousands of spammy links to a competitor and tank them, negative SEO would be ridiculously easy. Google has to account for that.

Exactly, that’s what makes the idea of blanket 301 penalties questionable.

If redirects inherently passed a penalty, it would create an obvious negative SEO attack vector, so Google generally evaluates the quality and context of the redirect rather than automatically penalizing the target.