I want my keywords to point to deep links within my site, but I want ALL site visitors to be forced to go to my squeeze page (homepage). So I created several blank pages within my wordpress site that have a 301 redirect to the homepage. Will having backlinks to this blank, 301 redirected page have a negative effect on my rankings, a positive effect by having an additional "deep link", even though it's not really a valid page, or no different effect than if I were to just create the link to the homepage? Hope I'm being clear. Thanks. -Robert
Answer: no different effect than if I were to just create the link to the homepage? However, if Google finds about this, im not sure if you could get a penalty or not. It is clear it as been made to manipulate search engines.
if you are doing 301 redirect, then the backlinks will point to the page where the redirection is taking the visitors to. 301 redirect is a permanent redirection so google will not even worry about your blank page. google will consider your destination URL and a landing page and will only focus on the content found on that page
Once the 301 is in place it is no longer considered a deep link... The home page is getting credit for the inbound link, NOT your phantom pages. Totally pointless... And many SEOs say that each time a search engine has to follow a 301 redirect that you lose a small amount of juice. This is likely because of Google's damping or decay factor in their PR calculation which causes a page to only pass out about 85% of the pages PR to its outbound links... So you "could" be hurting yourself by redirecting should this be true.
Thanks all. I'll stop. The reason I did this in the first place was because I thought it was bad (in Google's eyes) to see backlinks to only the homepage. So I wanted to create backlinks to additional pages, while ensuring that all visitors wound up on the home page anyway. I understand now that this strategy is pointless and potentially negative. Thanks for all your help.