300 Class Redirects No Longer Lose PageRank

[Ryuzaki]

Two days ago, Gary Illyes tweeted:

30x redirects don't lose PageRank anymore.
​

Twitter is perfect for Google. Vagueness and cryptic messages can be blamed on the character limit.

This isn't vague to me, but I've seen a storm of conversation surrounding this, all the way to the super skeptical: "Of course they don't lose PR because Google doesn't use PR any more." You have to wonder if these people even do a lick of SEO.

This is all the more reason to remember that when you use affiliate links you should also send a 302 code AND no-follow those links. Otherwise it's a paid link (which is what most of these "Thin Content" penalties have been about. That's a double speak name to keep people off the trail.)

John Mueller confirmed this news in the recent Google+ Hangout and there's even a video from 2013 with Matt Cutts saying no Page Rank is lost in these scenarios. I'm 100% certain they've contradicted themselves in that time span as well.

As for anyone who's made the switch from http to https knows... this is all balogna.

The question to ponder (and bypass the loss) is do canonicals lose Page Rank...

 

[CCarter]

"Of course they don't lose PR because Google doesn't use PR any more."

I have no idea why people think Pagerank no longer exists. I'm completely baffled by this one. I guess it's because the external tool hasn't updated in 2 years, and then recently Google turned it invisible - people came to the conclusion Pagerank doesn't exist anymore. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For the dense: Pagerank still exists, it's just that YOU can no longer see it (and the display hasn't updated in 2 years so whatever metrics you were able to see were 2 years old). PageRank is still an integral part of Google's algo - this one is almost as bad as the people saying "links no longer matter" - probably cause they were only creating shitty web 2.0 links that got devalued cause there was no trust.

 

[Future State]

If this is true, then they must be dinging some other metric, likely one based around relevancy.

 

[ryandiscord]

As for anyone who's made the switch from http to https knows... this is all balogna.

I've done an http to https switch and saw a 10% drop in traffic for about a week and a half, after that everything returned to normal. No real traffic gains from it but, I don't think there was a loss in page rank.

The question to ponder (and bypass the loss) is do canonicals lose Page Rank...

What do you mean, use a canonical instead of a redirect?

 

[jäger]

As for anyone who's made the switch from http to https knows... this is all balogna.

On more than one occasion I've seen search traffic increase after the switch, although that could just be the SSL factor contrasting the small juice leak, not sure. Immediate increase - like, as soon as the new URLs are indexed.

 

[CCarter]

Gary Illyes confirms what I stated in this thread: Google's Gary Illyes: Yes, PageRank Still Matters

 

[lion1978]

Gary Illyes confirms what I stated in this thread: Google's Gary Illyes: Yes, PageRank Still Matters

but I'll bet ya it's been significantly updated, even to the point where the old PR status being thrown about by seo sellers can't be trusted.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

but I'll bet ya it's been significantly updated, even to the point where the old PR status being thrown about by seo sellers can't be trusted.

This is absolutely true - even when the toolbar pagerank still existed, it hadn't been updated for so long, who knows what it even was for the sites listed by the time they stopped providing the old data.

The one thing that we do miss as linkbuilders is the old 'pr0' on a site that had good metrics on AHREFS, Moz, Majestic etc because Google had slapped the site for some reason. There's now no public way to tell if a site has fallen foul of the rules, and consequently google won't care much if they link to you - a DA50 link might actually be pr0... and now there's no easy way to tell if you wasted your time getting it.

There are some proxies you can use to measure if a site has been slapped, of course, like AHREFS traffic data or SEMRUSH. But... those can be very hit and miss. I'm still confused how AHREFS, for example, thinks I lost 90% of my traffic on a site that's actually growing in organic search...

With that said it wasn't a huge proportion of sites that we ever saw that were good on all other metrics and slapped so over the course of a year, unless you're consistently hanging out in the wrong circles, and obtaining links from the wrong kinds of people (people who got their great metrics everywhere by building link wheels... and obsessing with web 2.0 spam... etc) I can't imagine you'd end up getting too many bad links. After all, when you search for sites to outreach to, you're generally going to be searching on Google to find them... the ones Google shows up near the top are hardly likely to have been penalized, one would suppose!

 

[lion1978]

The one thing that we do miss as linkbuilders is the old 'pr0' on a site that had good metrics on AHREFS, Moz, Majestic etc because Google had slapped the site for some reason. There's now no public way to tell if a site has fallen foul of the rules, and consequently google won't care much if they link to you - a DA50 link might actually be pr0... and now there's no easy way to tell if you wasted your time getting it.

I totally agree with you the PR0 was a great indicator of where not to go, I don't even pay attention to those metrics of moz majestic and ahref and the likes of them when building links, but I do find it funny to se seo pakkage sellers on especially one forum using them to hype up their pbn and web 2.0's and some still use the old PR as well, at the same time I can also understand how difficult it must be for either a newbie seo trying to learn or an internet entrepreneur wanting to grow their business through buying seo, to seperate the good from the bad and the bad from the nasty.

sometimes I think I have gone back in time listening to some "seo experts" and I mean back in time to when people would ask matt from google about seo and how they should be building links, the most valuble things was the ones he didn't say or said between the lines if you will.

sometimes we need to analyze everything we hear and read from all possible angles, and unfortunatly a lot of people do forget that.

hope I didn't rant to much on this and that I at least make some sense in what I say, if not I'll excuse my self with the fact that it's 2:45 am here and that I am not completely sober.