404 Negative Link Redirect Question

[sunnyujjawal]

I was reading this post [seroundtable.com ]

Suppose one of my URL is having negative links. Now i change the URL to a new URL. Definitively it will affect my traffic, if i redirect the old negative URL to new URL, will Google count the new URL as negative.

[tedster]

Yes - a redirect is not like a 404 at all, and John Mueller was talking about a 404. A redirect will hold on to the effects. Here's partr of what he wrote:

In general, if you remove the page that is being linked to (such as a spammy forum thread) and make sure that it returns a 404/410 HTTP response code, we'll ignore the links to those pages...

If you find that there's a significant number of problematic links that you can't remove which are linking to general parts of your forum (eg the forum homepage), moving the forum to a different URL might be a possibility (but I'd only recommend doing that if you're absolutely sure that these links are causing problems -- we're pretty good at ignoring spammy links).