Rank Decay: 301 Redirects Do Not Fully Pass On PR

[orvn]

Just a little FYI from Cuttsy.

Originally Posted by Eric Enge

Let's say you move from one domain to another and you write yourself a nice little statement that basically instructs the search engine and, any user agent on how to remap from one domain to the other. In a scenario like this, is there some loss in PageRank that can take place simply because the user who originally implemented a link to the site didn't link to it on the new domain?

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

That's a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).

Source: 301 Redirects Do Not Pass Full PageRank & Link Value

The actual "rate of decay" isn't mentioned, but it's still something to consider.
For me, it has changed my policy of always redirecting my non-www's to www. I now check how many links I have to each and direct the minority to the majority.

In light of this new information, I find myself reexamining strategies that use redirects from a new perspective.

Curious.