Hi, I'm using a 301 redirect from an old, well ranked domain to a new domain due to a rebrand, and I'm trying to get my head around EXACTLY how search engines/google rank the 301. I know its supposed to maintain your old domain's ranking, but surely google must also take into account the content on the new domain? Or are you effectively ranked twice, once from the redirect and once from the content on your new domain? As I have the homepage redirect running through a querystring when it hits the new domain, I can see that my best listings on google are coming via the redirect (so /index.php?redirect=1); so I know the redirect is giving me benefit. But as the ranking for the new site is not as good as the old site, I'm assuming that the new content is also assessed, and that's what's causing us to rank lower - unless of course the lower ranking is purely a domain age thing. Anyway, sorry to ramble, but if anyone can shed any light that would be great. Cheers FLM
A 301 is a status header which basically says "Page Permanently Moved". So if you have a page here: olddomain.com/page1.html > which redirects to > newdomain.com/page2.html Then any pagerank, authority, etc. that page1 had is passed to page2. But if you are building links to page2, you are indeed increasing it's pagerank. Eventually Google will de-list page1 from it's index and only list page2, and any pagerank page1 had accumulated will be absorbed into page2. However, some ranking loss may occur, as Google re-evaluates the index, etc., but eventually you should be back to the same place in the SERPS you were before, and perhaps even better off if you continue linkbuilding for page2.