Google On 301 Redirects As Passing Full Credit Or Not

Google’s John Mueller was asked on Twitter if 301 redirected links pass full credit or not. John responded that “I wouldn’t see it as “full credit or not”, but rather – as mentioned in our docs – it’s a good practice for any move to update the important old links to point at the right new pages.”

John doesn’t want to address how much credit a link that 301s to another link passes but rather that it is important to redirect those links for SEO purposes to help with communicating to search engines, like Google, that URLs have moved.

Back in 2010, Google said 301 redirects do not pass full credit and over the years has tried to debunk 301 myths but because the responses from Google on 301s or 302s have always been somewhat not concrete – maybe because these things change or maybe because it depends on a lot of factors – SEOs have a hard time trusting the information from Google on 301s.

Last year, Google has expanded its redirect help document which you can find over here but again, SEOs are a bit obsessed about the specific weights, which Google will never really tell anyone.

Here are the tweets:

I wouldn’t see it as “full credit or not”, but rather – as mentioned in our docs – it’s a good practice for any move to update the important old links to point at the right new pages.

— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) June 9, 2022

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Forum discussion at Twitter.