Will an internal 301 transfer PR?

What's the current state of things?

[peterdaly]

I have a page that ranks very well for my #1 traffic term. I've just rolled out a new version of essentially the same page with updated information (think software version change.)

I had reasons not to just update the old page, so I built a new one. I've already collected a bunch of very valuable links to the new URL.

If I 301 the old URL to the new URL, will the pagerank for both URLs be aggregated together?

I've added a "View the new version of this page" type link on the old page...but a name change on the old url (like myfile.html to myfile_old.html) followed by a 301 redirect on myfile.html to newfile.html would be the best for users, as the old version could still be available, but the rankings would be transfered to the update version.

The searches I was doing on WW were mostly finding data that's a little outdated....what's the current state of internal 301 redirects? Will I take a rankings hit, all else being equal?

[tedster]

Yes, the previous PR etc should pass through a 301 redirect - not immediately but eventually, after a week or maybe several weeks. I would make sure that the old version of the page (at the modified url) is kept out of the Google index - robots.txt would be best.

[edited by: tedster at 11:56 pm (utc) on June 3, 2007]

[rainborick]

Is it really a good idea to block an old page via robots.txt in this situation? I would have thought that blocking a URL via robots.txt would negate the beneficial effects of the 301 redirect since Googlebot would never see it in this situation since the source/old URL is then blocked.

[tedster]

I believe he's talking about creating a new URL to hold the old page content, so that visitors can still access it. It's that new URL I'm suggesting he block.

[peterdaly]

Hmm, would have never thought about robots.txt'ing the newly named old file.

Maybe I should just remove it from the site (easy with the CMS) instead of robots.txt'ing it until new rankings have kicked in.

[tedster]

Well, it would be a judgement call based on how similar the content is on the two pages.