Is it okay to redirect twice? Will I still get my juice?

[jasonpoxxon]

A previous WM change the url structure on a few thousand pages on a site I own.

I need to do a 301 of these domains to their new locations as there are quite a few nice backlinks to the old urls.

If I did it this way:

/10082010/news-story1 (old url)

redirects to: /news-story1

which redirects to:

/2010/08/10/news-story1

Would that ensure the juice gets through?

That would be two redirects.

Reason is that when you remove the date stamp from the old URLs it redirects to the new ones.

There is no way I can think of to rewrite the old ones as the new ones except manually (4,000 urls).

Any thoughts, much appreciated.

J

[spunkle]

2 redirects is fine, Google has stated so many times.

[lucy24]

There is a recent thread about the reasoning behind redirects and loss of link juice. Turns out it was all based on ancient html-style redirects where the user is presented with an option and can choose not to follow it.

But in your specific case: if URL #1 is
/10082010/news-story1

and URL #3 is
/2010/08/10/news-story1

why on earth wouldn't you redirect straight from 1 to 3? It's a single line in htaccess, assuming the text part is the same as in your example.

[bhartzer]

2 redirects are fine, but 3 or more is not.

If you have control over it, though, why do the redirect in the first place?

[g1smd]

It's best if all old URLs can redirect to the newest URL in a single hop.

This means altering old redirects to point to the new location as well as adding the new redirects.

[phranque]

if your urls all follow the pattern you described above i would definitely implement all redirects in one hop.

read this and decide - Matt Cutts Answers How Much PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4548792.htm [webmasterworld.com]