Anybody Know How 301 Redirects Affect Rankings?

[TheAge]

Yo Warriors!

Does anybody have any info on how 301 Redirects affect ranking?

I'm wanting to move a site to Wordpress, and my money page will have to change to http://www.mysite.com/this-keyword-yo from http://mysite.com/this-keyword-yo.html

So for one I wish to redirect everything to put a WWW at the front (at the moment I'm doing the opposite, simply because I started linking without it at the beginning because I knew no better). But the most important thing is how changing the URL of my money page will affect it's rankings (in all honesty it's not that great at the moment cos I hardly know what I'm doing... but it's still 2 months of work I don't want to lose).

I recall reading that a page's PR will slowly shift over a couple of months until it has all been transferred (my money page has a PR2 at the moment).

Though in all honesty, I don't care too much about PR. I'm just hoping all the link juice I'm getting at the moment instantly switches over to the new URL. Or is it once again a gradual shift? Will I fall off the first page of Google (currently at the bottom), only to climb back a couple of months later (this will be killer... haven't made any sales in a couple weeks and monthly payments are coming up, uh-oh!)?

Does anybody have any experience with ranking and 301 redirects? Any info about how rankings change after a URL change would be very greatly appreciated.

Thanks y'all

Adrian

[TrafficVault]

Hi Adrian,

The 301 redirect is Google's preferred way for you to let them know about changing your domain name. It sort of acts like a forwarding address at the post office. The only thing to keep in mind is that you may drop out of the results briefly before your site returns. To minimize this, make sure you update your HTML and XML sitemaps and submit the new XML sitemap to the search engines. Also, you are going to want to start updating your backlinks to point to the correct domain. I hope this helps and good luck.

[thomasr]

A 301 Redirect is a great thing to do for your site. IN fact Google looks at your 2 different pages (www.mysite.com & mysite.com) as 2 different pages. By adding a 301 redirect the page juice will be combined. You will see no ill effects.