Head of Webspam at Google and SEO guru Matt Cutts has confirmed that 301 redirects results in a loss of PageRank. In an interview with Eric Enge published on March 14th 2010 Matt confirmed that 301′ing from an old domain to another, does result in PageRank decay.
Whenever you move a URL or domain name we are advised by Google to use a 301 redirect. We were also told that we do this the 301 redirect would pass PageRank. This interesting insight confirms that this information wasn’t completly true.
Here’s the quote from the interview:
“Matt Cutts: That’s a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).”
As you can see from the quote above some of the PageRank from the redirected domain will be lost. But just how much PageRank loss is unclear. Many have speculated a loss of 10% going up to as much as 40%. It is certainly hard to say, but there is a loss.
So there you go. I would recommend reading the rest of the interview for some more SEO advice but just keep in mind that what Google tells you isn’t always 100% true.
Please feel free to discuss this on the SEO forum here.
