Is 301 safe with google?

question still not answered, or!?

[Yidaki]

Brett_Tabke said on June 12, 2002:

301's have been a brewing issue.
I agree that there are some problems with google and 301's. I think it's triggering their dupe page detectors instead of dropping the 301 listing. It has been doing this for quite some time.
The recommended way of moving a site as we'd heard last year, was via a 301 redirect. However, many of the sites I've moved in the last year, having gotten the pr0 bug after the move.
I've replaced many of ours with meta refreshed pages.

WebGuerrilla said on Sept 13, 2002:

... using a 301 server side redirect ... is helping google, not hurting them.

Ciml said on Sept 26, 2002:

I'd use a 301 redirect ...

Are there any new insights about using 301 to update changed URLs and to keep their PR? Is there still a risk?

There are sooo many discussions related to that and there is still no answer at the Google Knowledge Base.

I think this should ultimately get answered by google because changing URLs is as common as creating new URLs and pages!

[jdMorgan]

I successfully moved a site in March 2002 using 301-Permanently Moved server redirects with no problems at all. This was not only a server move, but also a domain name change - We went from a freebie /~user/ - type domain to a registered .org domain. The PR followed the site, and dropped only after the next Google update because some sites were slow about updating their links to our pages. However, since our ODP and Yahoo directory listings seem to be the biggest sources of PR, very little was lost (maybe 0.2 PR points). It has since recovered fully as the incoming links were updated.

The process I used was:

• Upload site to new server and test all pages, plus robots.txt and .htaccess functions.
  
• Put 301 permanent external redirects on old server.
  
• Initiate updates to all incoming links (e-mail other webmasters, ODP and Yahoo! directories).
  
• Wait for several Google update cycles until all important incoming links were updated and indexed.
  
• Take down old server account.
  

As ciml and WebGuerilla implied, using a 301 redirect is the correct thing to do according to HTTP conventions. As such, if Google or any other search engine has problems handing 301's, it is reasonable to assume that they will address those problems or have already done so. I agree that they ought to add a "How to move your site" help page to their webmaster FAQs section.

Google and Fast were the quickest SE's to catch on. Ink, Overture, and several others took longer (All of our listings are unpaid free listings, so we had to wait fot them to follow the ODP update). AltaVista is still not quite right and dropped some pages. I have had problems with them ever since Black Monday - October 25th, 1999, when they dropped thousands of perfectly-legitimate sites, and they may still have our site on their faulty spam-detector list.

However, all of our important traffic sources picked up on the change within three months, and very little traffic seemed to have been lost. However, our site is a non-profit informational site for a special-interest group, so our actual move-related risk was very low.

Because others have reported trouble using 301 redirects to move a site, I can't advise you to do this or not do this. However, it worked for me.

Jim