Can too many internal 301s hurt?

Can multiple internal 301 redirects hurt your ranking?

[pro_seo]

Hello Friends,

Can anyone tell me whether too many (more than 10) internal 301 redirects can harm a site's search engine ranking?

There is this site where content on a particular subject was spread over multiple pages...so I combined the content on a single page and redirected the other pages to that page.

I have done this for quite a couple of pages in that site. Now the ranking of the site has dropped by 4-5 places in Google.

So I was wondering if the redirects have got something to do with this fall...or can internal redirects like this hurt a site's SE ranking?

Your thoughts please...

Thanks

[pro_seo]

Anybody....?

[Ondrej]

Hi pro_seo, I can't imagine why the simple 301 amount should have anything to do with it. Unless you lost content and indexed pages that way, which might matter.

I'll run a little wild imagination here though. All that 301s do (to my best knowledge) is that the 301 source pages inherit the PageRank of page they target. Could then blackhat SEO use 10 top keywords in 10 different page filenames and 301 forward all of them to target page thus multiply the target pages PageRank (spread it on the 10 pages)? He would only gain SEO effect from page names which isn't much at all though...

[Receptional]

"more than 10"

No - 10 301s really won't harm your site in itself.

20,000 might be a different question - I don't know - but the only hard evidence I have of a problem with 301s is if you cannot generate a 404 at all. The bad effects of that seem mild.

But then you'd have infinite 301s!

[SEOMike]

so I combined the content on a single page and redirected the other pages to that page.

This might be your problem. I find I get better results from lengthy content when I break it up into separate pages. I try to keep a user's attention span in mind when writing content and if something seems too lengthy, I'll cut it in half or thirds and make additional pages.

Reducing the number of pages with content relevant to your subject matter may be the thing hurting the rankings. Maybe, maybe not.