Mega-sites and 301's

[triggerfinger]

Thought question for you interweb professionals:

If you build links to content, then 301 that content to a different money page, with different content, and do this on a large scale (10k+ pages) is this a poor quality indicator for Google?

More generally, what are the potential effects of have very large amounts of 301 redirects within a mega-site? Has anyone had any experience with that?

Thanks in advance...

[tedster]

For the first part of your question, it's not only a poor indicator for Google, it's poor for the user. As a general rule, I'd say 301 tangles are one of the big issues that mega-sites face over time. You want to keep things as simple as you can (K-I-S-S) because complications come along anyway with a big site. So don't add to that inevitability by intentionally creating more complexity.

Most of the sites I work on have a major number of 301s in place from previous versions. These are a source of uncounted problems and the reason that sites with millions of backlinks can have challenges ranking anyway, despite all that apparent power.

[deadsea]

It isn't always bad for users.

Lets say you are a large product site with lots of product pages for products that are no longer manufactured. I would say that is is perfectly acceptable to redirect those pages to pages that list similar items, like a category page. If the user can't get the exact thing, at least you give them the chance of finding something else that would suit their needs. From an SEO perspective you preserve any pagerank that those old product pages had accumulated from external links. I seen this done on mega-sites with no penalty.

The way that you phrase the question seems to indicate that you might be trying for some sort of bait and switch. I certainly wouldn't recommend that.

It is also possible that removing and redirecting large numbers of pages at once could trigger a penalty. If I were Google, that is the sort of behavior I would expect from a site if it changed ownership.

[goodroi]

based on my experience and the experience of my friends large scale 301 redirects can definitely impact a website in a negative way. having thousands of internal redirects can significantly impact site performance if its not setup properly. having thousands of external 301 redirects can look very weird to google and cause trouble.

301 redirects are generally very helpful but there are some caveats when you take it to extremes.

[tedster]

Among other things, a large number of 301 redirects can also impact how the crawl budget gets spent.

[triggerfinger]

Thanks for the input everyone. I guess if one were to implement 301's in this manner, it should be limited to where it is extremely relevant, and helpful to the user.