In an email today Mr. “Sam Gastro” asked a question about 301 redirect and how it works.

This is the email he sent me:

Something I have been wondering about (and scared to actually attempt) is to merge sites into one domain. One of my sites has been around for 5 years, and ranking well with a PR of 4, my other domain is a PR0 with only 6 months of age. The point of creating the new domain and site was to try new marketing ways and also SEO techniques. Well now I think my new site converts much better on sales than the old one, and has a more appealing and understanding domain name, although only 6 months old. I have heard a 301 redirect will transfer all the rankings and backlinks and all that good stuff, but I am afraid to try it in fear of loosing all the sales on my old site. I think this might be a problem for a lot of marketers. I hope you have some insight on doing things like this. Is it too risky to do a 301 redirect on the old site?

What he is asking is how th 301 redirect actually works. Does it retain the backlinks and rankings to new site from old site. I have seen many people asking in forums about how they can move an older site of theirs to a new domain without loosing their backlinks and rankings in Google. Can that be done at all?

The answer is, yes, it can be done but not completely (not 100%). There are many factors in the ranking of a website and the age of the domain is also one of them. In a 301 permanent redirect, the backlink juice is surely transferred to the new domain, but backlinks are not the only reason for your ranking (though it is one of the major reasons).

So how does it goes in reality?

Let me give you with an example. I had a HIV symptoms related website called http://www.hivsymptoms.org. For some reason, I had to move it to a new domain http://www.hivsymptomsonline.com. I used the 301 permanent redirect. I put the following in the .htaccess file in the main folder of the domain:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.hivsymptomsonline.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I replicated the site on the other host with EXACTLY SAME directory and file structure. So all the traffic from this site was redirected to the new ‘HIV symptoms online’ website.

But how did the rankings for the old and the new site do?

HIV symptoms .org site was ranking number one for “hiv symptoms” keyword before this move. After the redirect the same site stayed number one position for next 15 days or so. Then the site vanished from the SERPs and new site did no appear. After the next 15 days, the new site hivsymptomsonline.com came up in top 10 rankings. Then in the next 3 months the ranking of the site is increasing slowly. As of this writing (around 4months have passed), the rank for the new site has reached at number 2 for keyword hiv symptoms in Google.

I have not done any extra link building or anything special. I just did the redirect as stated above. It has reached number 2 in 4 months. I expect to reach number one in next 3 months or so.

So, with the help of this example, you can see that how the 301 permanent redirect works for the backlinks and the ranking of the site.