How do Google SERPs treat 301 redirects?

[internetheaven]

If I have a site with four pages:

www.example.com (which has topic 1)
www.example.com/topic2.php
www.example.com/topic3.php
www.example.com/topic4.php

and I redirect the first three pages to new dedicated websites for each topic i.e.

www.example.com to www.exampletopic1.com
www.example.com/topic2.php to www.exampletopic2.com
www.example.com/topic3.php to www.exampletopic3.com
www.example.com/topic4.php remains where it is.

if a user types "example.com" into a search engine looking for our site what will Google show in the results?

1. www.exampletopic1.com
2. www.example.com/topic4.php
3. None of my sites will rank for that.

Your ideas would be appreciated. Obviously what we want to do is much larger than this but this is the basic idea.

Thanks
Mike

[tedster]

I have no test cases for redirecting several internal urls to the root of new domains. But here's what I do know about domain root to domain root 301 redirects. There's something to be learned from it, I think.

When the 301 redirect goes from a previous domain to a new domain, Google usually shows the new domain as the top result on a search for the orginal domain name. I say usually, because it doesn't always work this way and I don't know for sure what the factors involved are. It might be previously indexed content at the original domain, or backlinks still alive to the old domain. I've got one client with over 1,000 redirected domains, some previously active and some purchased just for type-in traffic or brandname protection. But the pattern on the example.com search (where example.com is the original, source domain) is not clear to me.

However, here you are talking about 301 redirects from several INTERNAL urls. So if there is still content resolving on the original domain with a 200 status, I'd say that's what would be returned at the top of the results. Whether the redirect's target domains will show further down the list or not -- that's a crapshoot as far as I can see.

If there is no remaining content on the original domain, then you do have a better shot at seeing the redirect target domains in a search for example.com - but I would still think it's a bit of a crapshoot.

[internetheaven]

If there is no remaining content on the original domain

Thanks, that was one of our main questions about this 301 redirect thingy. The problem with that is, (what we have found when moving other domains) is that Google simply refuses to let anything go so if we were to return 404's for the remaining URLs Google still shows them 3-6 months after those URL's were removed.

It seems ludicrous that they do so but on one of our domains the 404'd URLs are crawled every 24-48 hours and they have been still ranking for 2 months. (Yes, the 404s were correctly done)

[jimbeetle]

if we were to return 404's for the remaining URLs Google still shows them 3-6 months after those URL's were removed

Yep, Google is notoriously slow in giving up on any pages that it might include in its index. It's usually not for more than a year, but any time between 6 and 12 months could be considered not at all unusual.