Link Structure change & Permanent Redirects

Will link popularity be carried over to new url's?

[chrisandsarah]

Hello. Due to site expansion i'm considering a url structure change.
Trouble is i have a few thousand incoming links to about 200 of the url's that would be changed. These url's rank high on google and I know changing them would see my rankings for them plummet.
Would permanent redirects 'make sure' that the link popularity for these pages gets carried over so the new url's adopt the old url's rankings?

this would solve all my problems if it did!

Thanks for any help or advice

[sfxmystica]

Google says its safe to do a 301 redirect ...

"If we continue to list an 'old' version of your site (i.e. we continue to list www.my123site.org despite the fact that your site now lives at www.my456site.org ) you need to update the links that are pointing to the sites. Since our robots jump from page to page via hyperlinks, someone must still be linking to the defunct page. Once others correct their links, we can too. Once your new site is live, you may wish to place a permanent redirect (using a "301" code in HTTP headers) on your old site to inform visitors and search engines that your site has moved."

Note that they do ask that all links pointing to your sites be changed to reflect your new url ...

You can get more information on this here : [snipurl.com...] [points to a page in google.com]

[chrisandsarah]

hi, thanks.
if i emailed every webmaster (thousands) asking them to change my link url on their site, i'd probably get around 2% actually bother and thats probably after about 12 months.
So basically i'm stuffed and link popularity does not get carried over with redirects.
So I'll now have to find a way of keeping my old url structure for certain important high ranking url's on my site.

many thanks,
chrisandsarah

[sfxmystica]

I am not sure if link popularity is NOT carried over ... after all, when you do a 301 redirect of example.com to www.example.com both have the same PageRank ...

[BigDave]

It sure looks like 301s work to tranfer PR for me. I have a pair of old links from an outside PR5 page that point to old addresses of 2 of my deep pages.

Both of these pages are PR4, while all the other pages at the same place in my site's link structure are PR3.

So it definitely passes PR. I do not know if it passes anchor text or any other off-page factors.