Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Koen Adams on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/13/2020).

Will redirection impact SEO?

Redirection impact on SEO?
A client of mine is selling his webshop business and wants to 301 redirect the webshop part of his current website to whatever the new domain of the buyer is. Other parts of his business would stay active on his current domain.
He wants to sell the `redirected traffic` as part of the package.
By redirecting only a part of his current domain to whatever the new domain of the buyer would be: Will the link juice be transferred? Will there be a more negative impact when redirecting only a part of the domain? Thoughts in general?
Each category and product will be redirected to corresponding pages on the new domain.
Thanks!
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YOUR ANSWERS

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

  • Don Vermeer: White hatters will go bla bla. Basically: just do it, seems fine. As long as it`s a private deal between 2 party`s and nothing that`s advertised online etc. :) (Het vormt geen negatief probleem :))
  • Koen Adams: OK, thanks. I would probably opt more for the white-hat side :-) But nice to know that you think it probably would just work. Dankje Don!
  • Brett Tabke: Completely acceptable (and welcome) in Googles eyes. They want to know where that content went. Any time a site is moved or part-of-a-site is moved, a 301 is totally appropriate and Google will be fine with it. (yes, the `link juice` will transfer for awhile, but Google has slowly dialed down the time they will "endure" hard 301`s. It will work for about 60-90 days depending on your crawl rate). I`d also leave out the part about `selling` the traffic.
  • Ammon Johns: Greg Jensen then you genuinely need to reconsider.

    Redirecting to the equivalent content is what a 301 is for, and WHY Google spent time teaching the spiders to obey it. That you have any doubts at all means there`s something wrong somewhere in your understanding of search and search engines at a very fundamental level.
  • Koen Adams: Brett TabkeAmmon Johns So after 60-90 days the redirection link juice would stop working? Why I`m asking this is that my client has some products that are ranking high in the search results. As a redirection would only work for 60-90 days that would mean the ranking results would drop significantly as that would probably be a new domain/website? So actually, in the end there is no real value to sell with 301 redirects?
  • Ammon Johns: Greg Jensen selling it with the property? Absolutely. The business has changed hands, or rather, a part of it, but it remains in the same business. The post specifically mentioned product-level redirects.

    Or do you think Google demotes itself everytime shares change hands?
  • Brett Tabke: Greg Jensen That is not the question here. The question is if he moves part of the site, should he 301. The fact there is a sale of the website involved is not applicable to the discussion.

    Yes, the value of the 301 will fade, rather quickly. (caveat, my last direct experience with this was about six months ago).
  • Ammon Johns: Koen Adams a search engine builds a list of URLs that it has found, that it has previously crawled, or that have been submitted. It then attempt to crawl them all on a fairly regular basis, although since there are billions of URLs, and some of them change from minute to minute (like social streams and forum homes), others from hour to hour, some from day to day, some from month to month, etc.

    Determining the most efficient crawl behaviour to index as much important content as possible is it`s own field of expertise and study within search engines.

    So long as it has links to a URL, the search engine will continue to occasionally crawl that URL and index what is there. If it is a 301, it takes a note of that (but it is not a browser and does not have to get instantly redirected - it will depend on crawl priority).

    There`s no limit of expiry on this, as the machine keeps doing what it is programmed to do as long as the URL has no reason to be deleted from the database it keeps, or as long as it keeps rediscovering that URL.
  • Koen Adams: Ammon Johns thanks for this answer! The link juice will fade then? Because this would make hardly sense when you`re rebranding for instance. Or perhaps I`m seeing this too simple?
  • Ammon Johns: Greg Jensen you really do have a perception problem. That`s not snark, its simply that some of us here aren`t making this stuff up as we go along based off what we`ve read, but from detailed YEARS of discussions with various Google engineers.

    Brett Tabke there, that you were doubting knew what he was talking about, has been someone I`ve known for longer than Google existed, and was already a respected SEO before Google came along.

    More directly relevantly, it was his forums, WebMaster World, where a Googler first chose to engage and discuss issues directly with SEOs outside of the very limited opportunities at conferences, or the very strict and formal language of Google`s own Webmaster Help section.

    So, Brett has a LOT of communication, both on and off the record, with Google`s engineers to guide his viewpoint, and so when he speaks on such things, the smart thing to do is to pay attention. Careful attention. And be exceedingly grateful he`s sharing.
  • Ammon Johns: Koen Adams over time, new links will all point to the new brand. In addition, some old links will probably be updated and changed to the new brand. But there`s always a few old links that tend to remain - whether it was some casual citation in a forum or social media post that nobody is going to go back and change, or just within some old article somewhere, some of the old URLs will remain, pointing to where the 301s are going to be now. If you keep the 301s there, then they will keep working, as long as Google still finds any reference to the old URLs anywhere on the billions upon billions of pages it indexes.
  • Koen Adams: Ammon Johns Awesome and thank you again! So if the 301s stay in place that only 60-90 days link juice isn`t a thing?
  • Ammon Johns: Koen Adams until no more links point to the old URLs where the 301 is, at least, yes.
  • Koen Adams: Ammon Johns Ok, I just realized tha 60-90 days was what Brett Tabke was talking about 🙃
  • Brett Tabke: Ya, selling off a rebrand for the link value, just isn`t what it used to be. Just 10 yrs ago (before panda), pr would transfer radically for a long long time. I had edu links from 99, that were running through 301`s (to a long since moved site), that were still paying value ten years later in 2009. That`s totally not the case today.

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/13/2020).