Does a 301 redirect remove potential link toxicity?

Let's say you have an example domain 123.org

It has heavy numbers of some decidedly toxic backlinks (Cialis etc etc) mixed in with a few good ones (on topic)

You acquire 123.com (with a clean/no backlink profile) and 301 123.org to it (before the .org gets a penalty)


So in theory (and probably in practice) 123.org will pass at least some link juice to the new domain.

But does it also pass the toxicity? (remember the 301 is done before any obvious penalty)

If you ran a backlink search on the new domain, would it show the old (toxic or otherwise) links to the .org that was now 301d to it?

301 perm will transfer all link juice good or bad

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Originally Posted by chaumi

Let's say you have an example domain 123.org

It has heavy numbers of some decidedly toxic backlinks (Cialis etc etc) mixed in with a few good ones (on topic)

You acquire 123.com (with a clean/no backlink profile) and 301 123.org to it (before the .org gets a penalty)


So in theory (and probably in practice) 123.org will pass at least some link juice to the new domain.

But does it also pass the toxicity? (remember the 301 is done before any obvious penalty)

If you ran a backlink search on the new domain, would it show the old (toxic or otherwise) links to the .org that was now 301d to it?

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Usually this really works. If not, double 301 works. There are lot of tricks like that.
But the last Panda or idk which animal it was in September put a lot of penalties on those (and those penalties ARE passed through 301).
Juice is not the same as the "toxicity".

Whack-a-mole.

No. You have to clean up the domain before you perform a 301 otherwise just don't 301 it.

I've tried exactly this on a major UK ecommerce site, that was under a penalty. The result? 10 days of pretty good rankings before all the penalties caught back up. In other words, 301 redirects don't work to clean your link profile - quite the reverse, they simply move the bad links to point to your brand new website.

There was an interesting session that touched on this at LAC on Friday, one of the speakers implied/suggested that it wouldn't carry forward whereas members of the audience said the exact opposite.

Tried it myself a few years ago on an expired domain I bought that was under a penalty and similar to tryme's experience the site flew for a matter of days then disappeared without trace.

Yes it will. Don't take that risk it's not worth it.

I 301'd a penalized site to a new domain once. It didn't help. It's best to clean up the link profile of the penalized site.

We had some success with this a couple of years ago, but we cleaned up the old sites backlink profile first as much as we could. So maybe it would have recovered anyway on the next refresh.

I've also tried this and the conclusion is that the only decent way of doing it is by cleaning up the link profile of the url where the 301 is going to be applied.

The entire idea behind the 301 is to "preserve" the rank signals of the page or domain to the new page or domain.

So it is only logical if no cleanup of a bad link profile of a domain 301'd to a new domain would preserve the bad link profile.

Rick
Universal4

Actually something else I meant to mention that we've noticed. We've also seen a case where Domain1.com had a bad link profile, but the site it pointed to ranked well and had no penalty despite the fact that it probably should have one. It was then redirected to Domain2.com and the new version immediately got penalised.

So it's almost as if very old sites with lots of history that had the dodgy links built pre-penguin and clean since have some kind of different threshold to a newer domain.