Redirects and backlinks

After a redirect how are backlinks affected

[Jemwig]

Hi

I am am wondering how using a redirect affects backlinks and SEO for a website.

Scenario

A company has a site built on one URL, xxxx.com, which has a number of backlinks and this is used for some time.

A new url, xxxx.ca, is introduced and used as the main address for the web and the company's customers.

This new .ca URL is now the promoted web address for the company. But the URL redirects any incoming traffic to the old URL, xxxx.com, in order to show the content.

How does this impact on SEO for the to addresses?

Any advice appreciated.

[fantasticode]

301 redirection can be used. It tells the search engines that any links & PR of the old URL now should be given to the new one.It is regarded as permanent move and safe move. Don't choose 302 redirection. And 301 redirection brings good experience to users.

[Alex_TJ]

We have something similar - we started off back in the day with a .net and then gradually went international with some CCTLDs, which are used for promotion in each country, mostly offline.
However, each of these are just one page homepages which then link to our main .net site in the various languages, with no redirect. To avoid these pages being seen as doorway pages we link to all of them from the sitemap plus they're listed along with the contact details of each country.
We haven't seen any issues, except for an unrelated panda problem, and often we're seeing the cctld close to the main site in the serps.

[g1smd]

The redirects should be page level, i.e. old page to new page and NOT old page to domain root.