: 301 redirect from new page to old to keep PageRank? I need to change a URL of an interior page that has a Google PageRank of 4. It was recommended by a coworker that I create the new URL

@Shanna517

Do you need to change the URL, or can you repurpose the high-ranking URL instead?

In other words, change of content that is still related to the old content, rather than a permanent redirect. PageRank will drop as far a Google is concerned, but 85% is not as good as 100% but way better than 0%. Of course any giant changes in other areas can have an effect as well. But 85% is not as good as 100% but better than the alternative.

If you think about it, a 301 redirect should have a little impact on the ranking, at least, and here's why: for external links into the website, now killed and served up as a new page.

Google has had for a few years now, at least has been reported to have a minimum of 15% penalty, or better stated 85% passthrough if you cannot keep the original URL. Only 85% of the page rank is retained as a penalty for not keeping the golden rule never ever change an URL EVER.
If you bought it for its page rank, you lose 15% instantly for gobbling it up. It makes sense.

Reason for penalty, and it might be much higher than 15% now: there is no legitimate reason as far as Google is concerned for changing an URL, unless you are shortening your website domain name, but KEEP the Old long one and permanently redirect it to the new folder of the shorter domain name.

In any case there is a hit on ranking to say convert one system to another: .asp to .php, .html to .php etc.

Another fix is NOT to 301 redirect with HTML where ranking is important but keep it(them) if it is worth it for you to have the server process a certain extension as a .php extension if it can, if changing extensions is your reason to redirect.

An unknown penalty hit is to make you think twice about plying games: I don't think anyone knows how big the hit is now: If done for the wrong purpose, the hit is registering your website as SPAM (perhaps a 20000% hit on the ENTIRE website, not just the page(s) in question.

For more information on the negative consequences here is a link to another thread in this forum recently:
Does purposely linking to an invalid URL and then using 301 affect SEO?

Google wants webmasters thinking of content, not gaming-masters-of-ranking. That's why they will not release Google Ranks anymore.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Yeniel560

Just an additional note to dan's answer: what you describe in your question is actually an old trick where if you redirect page B to page A, page B would gain the PageRank of page A.

This was manipulated in the past by making a URL on your site redirect to google.com, which had PR 10. Then after a few weeks, you'd update that page with new content and your page would temporarily keep PR 10 while also being relevant for a particular query, and thus be #1 in results.

Needless to say, Google got wise to that pretty quickly and this no longer has any effect (in fact it may even be seen as spam and cause a site penalty).

If your current page (page A in the above example) already has a good PR, then redirecting that to the new page (B) will transfer the PageRank so there is no need for silly tricks.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Samaraweera270

It was recommended by a coworker that I create the new URL but have it
redirect to the old one


If you 301 redirect the new URL to the old one, you'll just be telling search engines that the new URL permanently moved to the old URL, and to continue indexing the old URL instead of the new one.

You'd want to do the opposite: 301 redirect the old URL to the new one, to let search engines know that it permanently moved to the new URL and to index that.

See this for more on 301 redirects as covered by Google Webmaster Tools.

Also, note that PageRank is updated periodically, and as of recent, hadn't been updated for over 10 months as covered here. Instead of PageRank, you might do better to focus on the quality of your content and links pointing to your site, as Matt Cutts covers here.

Vote Up Vote Down