Will a 301 Transfer PageRank?

Taking advatage of "orphaned" links...?

[elklabone]

We do advertising on our site for various inviduals in this format...

www.oursite.com/ads/clientname

Our clients then promote their own "page" on our site as they see fit.

If they cancel their account, the URL remains active, and is replaced by a generic "sorry, they've left" page, but the headers are not changed to 404.

It just occured to me that there are probably lots of incoming links pointing to old clients who have canceled...

I did a search on Google for "oursite.com/ads/" and found over 100 links pointing to old clients who are now gone.

Our site uses PHP, so it would be easy to do a 301 redirect and point all of the missing clients to our homepage... however, I want to take advantage of all of this wasted PageRank!

Here's my question:

Will a 301 actually cause that "wasted" pagerank from all of these orphan links to get "transferred" to our homepage?

OR, would it be better to use PHP and pop a simple page in there with a single link to our homepage?

Or in the post-florida world would it be better to pop a site map in there and try to distribute the pagerank to the entire site equally?

Any ideas here would be greatly appreciated!

[mcavic]

Yep, 301 should transfer PR, and it'll get those old links out of the SE's too. I'd point the 301's to your index page, but you could also point them to a site map.

[elklabone]

How about my total backlinks? Can anyone confirm that this will increase my number of total backlinks if I do a 301 and direct all of these links to my homepage?

--Mark

[elklabone]

Can anyone confirm this?

[plasma]

Yes, all links will be counted as if they were directly to the redirected url.

[Imaster]

I did a 301 redirect for my old domain to a new domain, didn't ask any websites to link to the new url, and in the new update I saw all those links appearing as backlinks for my new domain.

I also got to a 7 PR in a month without any actual direct links to the new domain. All the links that exists are for the old domain.

[As observed in the last 3 months]

[optimist]

Wouldn't it just be easier to point them to the same IP same folder instead of seperate hosting and a 301?

[BrewCrue]

What if you use 301 to redirect to the same page but to a different url?

[nativenewyorker]

BrewCrue,

PR is assigned by page and not by site. PR would pass to the target page irrespective of the domain (assuming the domain is not penalized).

Ted

[NazaretH]

I have a site "site.com" and smaller site with different content at "search.site.com". For technical reasons I merged them to one "site.com" and set a 301 redirect on "search.site.com". Will this add links and PR of "search.site.com" to "site.com"? I have many different backlinks to both of them and would like to loose them.

On more little thing - some sites link to both of them from one page.. If Google transfers links and PR, will two links from one page of another site count as one then?

Thank you for help.

[NazaretH]

Anybody? ...pleeease :)

[doc_z]

Will this add links and PR of "search.site.com" to "site.com"?

It should work. However, I would try to change incoming links.

If Google transfers links and PR, will two links from one page of another site count as one then?

If these pages are merged by Google, then there shouldn't be a benefit for multiple links (for PR).