Pagerank and forwarding

[stellar73]

Hi,

I'm a bit confused as to how pagerank works in terms of re-directs (301, 302's) so wonder if someone can clarify....

The reason I ask is that I have a particular domain which I've owned since 2006 which was bought to use as a personal site.

It ended up not being used till 2009 when I put a personal photography site on it. The site was live (but in a half finished state) till 2011 so I'm pretty sure would not have attracted any PR of it's own accord as I did no marketing of it.

I took it down mid 2011 and did a temporary re-direct (302) to the website of a company I was working for at the time (I have since checked their website's PR and it's PR4).

Around a year ago I checked it's PR for the first time and it was PR4 (it remains at that today). I presume this is because of this re-direct but it seems a bit weird and illogical to me that my domain could gain pagerank through something as simple as this, particularly as it was a temporary as opposed to permanent re-direct..... I have just taken the re-direct off a few days ago to see what happens.... I presume my PR will tank now so there will be no point in me trying to exploit this situation by using the domain for something else?

 

[Blossom]

You can always look at the backlinks of your name (OSE will show them with and without the redirect) to see if you attracted any.

If the PR is reliant on the site that your name is redirecting to, then yes it will tank when you remove the redirect.

 

[stellar73]

Thanks Blossom, will check OSE though I doubt that's it, must be from the other site, thought it was too good to be true!!

Ah well....

 

[GWM]

Re-directs

I'm no expert but I do know these re-directs are designed to transfer link weight. 302's are not considered Search Engine friendly but 301's are. You are better off only redirecting relevant content. I can see that some people are getting away with 301's from all sorts of irrelevant sites but Google is working hard to end this. Part of the Penguin update was to look out for un-natural linking structures. Make hay while the Sun shines.

 

[crabfoot]

If you redirect a domain it acquires the PR of the page that it is pointed at. After that, the PR will drop - but if you don't tell Google, and work quickly, you might hang on to a little of the PR.

If you put a new site on a domain, then leave it for Google to find, Google will re-evaluate and assign a new rating.

If you tell Google what you're doing before you have a site ready to roll, they re-evaluate very quickly and you're stuck with what you've got.

Example 1: I had two PR2 domains that I was going to build out slowly, using the same template.

I tied one in to my Analytics account and the PR went to n/a in under 15 min. The other one was still showing as PR2 a week later, although Google found it soon afterwards and dropped it down to n/a.

Example 2:
Another domain was PR3 because it had been used to point at a domain with a similar name. I put 3 pages of crud on it (2 or 3 pics per page), left it for Google to find, and it got reduced to PR1 - but not down to sub zero.

I have yet to try messing with other domains, but that little bit of learning is enough to show me that you have a short breathing space in which you might be able to hang onto some of the PR by getting some interest in the site, if you don't tell Google about it from the start.

 

[Murray]

302 redirects do not pass pagerank.

301 redirects do pass pagerank, but not all, you lose a little bit of juice from the original site.

Remember visible pagerank is only updated roughly four times a year, so just because a page says it is PR4 or PR0 at the time, doesn't mean it actually is.

You can check backlinks on OSE as posted above, or you can use something like spyglass which shows the PR of linking pages.

Pagerank is a poor metric for quality anywhoo, you could have 100 links from crummy directories and have a pr4

Or you could have a few links from .gov .ac.uk and have a PR2..

Id much rather have the PR2 in that situation.

 

[stellar73]

302 redirects do not pass pagerank.

301 redirects do pass pagerank, but not all, you lose a little bit of juice from the original site.

Hi Darren,

I presumed prior to starting this thread was that 302's wouldn't pass page rank however the domain I was referring to has only ever had a 302 on it (never a 301) and it gained a page rank of 4 (which matched the PR on the site I forwarded to). There is absolutely no other explanation I can think of for how it gained this page rank as it was briefly a fairly sparse half finished site that didn't have a single link to it and it was a clean registration which had never been regg'd by anyone else before.

 

[Murray]

Hi Darren,

I presumed prior to starting this thread was that 302's wouldn't pass page rank however the domain I was referring to has only ever had a 302 on it (never a 301) and it gained a page rank of 4 (which matched the PR on the site I forwarded to). There is absolutely no other explanation I can think of for how it gained this page rank as it was briefly a fairly sparse half finished site that didn't have a single link to it and it was a clean registration which had never been regg'd by anyone else before.

Not sure then pal.

Not going to lie to you I have no practical experience with a 302, never had an occasion it was needed, just always read they don't pass pagerank.

302 Found (HTTP 1.1) / Moved Temporarily (HTTP 1.0)
A 302 Redirect is a temporary redirect and passes 0% of link juice (ranking power) and in most cases should not be used. The Internet runs on a protocol called HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which dictates how URLs work. It has two major versions, 1.0 and 1.1. In the first version 302 referred to the status code 'Moved Temporarily'. This was changed in version 1.1 to mean 'Found'.

From seomoz

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Maybe your site is an interesting case study contradicting that