What are 301 Redirects Rules You Need to Know for SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an always changing and constantly updating industry that many finds it challenging to understand. Before, one of the rules that you should be aware of is 301 redirections.

As early as 2013, Matt Cutts has confirmed that 301 redirects lead to around 15% loss of PageRank. Meanwhile, 302 redirects (or temporary redirect) does not pass PageRank. Lastly, HTTPS migrations suffers the loss of PageRank as well, as it involves plenty of 301 redirects from the old site to the new website.

From trying to migrate an entire website from HTTP to HTTPS, you might be worried about how much this is going to hurt your website. Many people have put off migrating to HTTPS or cleaning up URLs to make them easier to read for this exact reason.

New 301 Redirects Rules Which Matters to SEO

1. In June 2016, Gary Illyes of Google told Jennifer Slegg of The SEM Post that it does not matter which type of redirect you use, whether 301, 302 or 307, as all will pass PageRank. Now, you can carry out that much-needed migration without you worrying if it will affect your SEO ranking.
2. In February 2016, Google’s very own John Mueller posted in his Google+ account that: 301 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS now cause NO loss of PageRank. That is an important announcement and should be more than enough for webmasters to take the plunge and adopt HTTPS on their website. Last year, we have also migrated our own SEO website from HTTP to HTTPS and we did not encounter any loss of PageRank or whatsoever.
3. In July 2016, Gary Illyes tweeted that: “30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore.”

30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore.

— Gary “鯨理／경리” Illyes (@methode) July 26, 2016

This should make it much easier for you to make a big change to how you work and also how you tend to adapt to dealing with your migration. More importantly, you should feel comfortable knowing that your websites are going to be far less affected from a migration than they once would have been.

So, the old rules where you got your ass kicked no longer are quite so prevalent. So long as the link is relevant to the redirect itself and the only thing that should change is the URL, not the content, then you should be OK.

If you try turn an old community page into a fly-by-night affiliate site with high traffic, it will not do well. Basically, you can migrate without issue now as long as redirects are relevant. Make sure to do some testing first just to be sure.

Need help with migration of your website or you need an SEO consultant to discuss 301 redirects? Contact us today!

Source: Moz
Image courtesy of Thomas Hawk on Flickr.