(Entry was posted by Jobin Joh on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 02/28/2019).

Passing ranking with 301 redirect

I have a stupid question.... Say if site X has a page that ranks #1 for a specific keyword then they 301 redirect that page to a third party site Z`s page. Will the site Z start to rank #1 for that keyword?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Michael Martinez: That sometimes happens. John Mueller just said in a recent hangout that Google may not transfer the ranking signals if the destination page is different from the redirected page (i.e., don`t redirect a page about cars to a page about horses). This reservation presumably devalues attempts to reclaim link profiles from older Websites.
Rob Woods: it depends... how well does the page on site Z answer the query? how much trust does site Z`s brand have? how much internal link equity is page Z getting from other pages on domain Z? How fast is page Z? etc. etc. The redirect basically transfers almost all of the link equity from page A, and not much else
Benj Arriola: Before the Panda update and the Penguin update, 301 redirecting sites was a blackhat tool by some SEOs where sheer number of links creating link bombs, all quantity less quality used to be strong enough to mysteriously put pages ranking #1 for keywords for no apparent reason. But that was 2010 and older.