When you 301 redirect a domain name, does google pass on backlinks / PR from the domain being 301 redirected to the resulting domain name I thought it did.
yes, it does, as stated above. however, the rankings may not be the same. if you're moving from a trusted, old domain to a new, untrusted, sandboxed domain, expect a drastic drop in traffic.
cool, i thought it did, just starting to get real nervous!! have you ever done it? how long do you reckon it would take? we used a 301 for our previous PR5 domain and im getting impatiant now especially as SEM is one of our services, having a PR0 isnt the best selling point!
About a year ago, I had a site on keyword1-otherword.com that ranked well for a few phrases with keyword1. Then I decided to move that entire website under another domain - domain2.com - which did not have the keyword in the domain name. All the pages from the original site were moved to the new one with the exact same folder structure and filenames. I also added a bunch of new content without disturbing the original site structure (except for the menu naturally). I added 301 redirects from the old domain to the new one. Well, the site almost disappeared in google for all the keyword1 phrases that it used to rank top ten. All the SERPs moved from page 1 to page 4 or 5 (but did not disappear entirely). This lasted for 3-6 months (I don't remember exactly how long it was) before one day they magically returned to roughly the same page 1 SERPs that they enjoyed before the changeover. It seemed to me that the anchor text of links pointing to a page that suddenly returns 301s (which used to be a page returning 200s), gets a "dampening factor" on it's importance in the algo for a while.
It works the same way as checking for 404 errors in your stats. I had a website that was PR3 then it went to PR1 - without any real changes and I put it down to simply a reconfiguration of the PR algorithm (or previous sites no longer existing etc). I recently revamped the website and changed extensions from .shtml to .html and then observed the stats - redirecting through 301s any 404 pages. Within 48 hrs of having done all the redirects, the PR returned to PR3 (at least for the homepage ) I would expect the same result when changing domain names - however, it could become sandboxed and would just have to ride out the delay until it gained its former position again (unless higher competition or new algorithms outdated previous SEO). Hopefully though, you would bypass any sandbox affect and quickly see similar SERPS (or better if more optimised) than you had with your original site.
that's interesting, but I certainly wouldn't draw the same conclusions from that as you do. I've done a lot of 301s where the traffic never dropped off at all, nor were there any changes in the serps. what you described to me sounded like moving from a trusted domain to an untrusted (or less trusted?) domain and with some time it gained enough trust to break free.
301 is great when moving pages on a site. Not so great when changing domains to newly purchased doman. PR will transfer but it seems like that's it. You will still find the new domain in the so called sandbox.
Yeah they do, but I would do this if they are semi-related websites. For example if I found a expired domain on cell phones with some PR and Backlinks, I wouldn't 301 it towards a site that dealt with live web cams.
My PR3s and PR2s are not transferred for many months now. Yes it's 301! I would say 301 is safer than 302 but not completely safe.
Why not safe? I'm about to 301 some of my pages under the same domain. What are the possible disadvantages of using 301?
The disadvantage is that it takes months to transfer the PR to new page. But i can feel it's 5 months already since I 301ed some pages in the same domain, yet all PRs are not transferred yet.
I don't think it matters how long before the PR will be transferred. It will be directed on the new page anyway. Right?
I dont know exactly what you mean. However, this is the way I am doing it for a site at the minute. This is for placing a page in the existing site and redirecting to a new page. So your original page would be replaced with a page containing just the information quoted and this should then set the permanent 301 and instantly redirect your visitors to the new page location. I dont know if that is what you meant, but it has worked fine for me - I guess it depends on the current coding used how it would differ. The above was for apache/linux/php combination redirecting to a new domain and new page structure.
Url redirect and rewrite are htaccess's job. Unless you need to do advance rewriting like rewriting "article title here" to "articleid=123", you don't need php. Ok, google search "url redirect htaccess"