Multiple 301 redirects from bought domains

Your assumption is not necessarily correct. There are people who claim this to be true, but I've yet to see this work in reality... at least now-a-days. Maybe this worked back in 1999, but not anymore.

301 redirecting multiple domains will pass any PR that their URLs might have acquired to the single target domain. But there are a lot of flaws in your theory.

1) You will ONLY get passed PR if there are sites still linking to URLs on the old domains that you buy and redirect. Like most webmasters/SEO guys who manage almost any site of significance, I don't like broken links on my site so when I detect them w/ Xenu or by other means, I remove the link. If I ever found out the page I was linking to was being redirected to a site other than the one I originally linked to then I would also reomove the link.

2) You are assuming that webmasters give up valuable domains. In reality not many do... at least the ones with any brains or web saviness.

3) Should you buy an old site that was previously banned or penalized, you could get your site penalized should you redirect the banned penalized site... at least temporarily until you prove to Google that you are the new owner and plan to build a legitimate web site at that domain. This will likely end up triggering some manual review.

4) If someone like a competitor issues a spam report on your site because of something they believe to be a violation of Google's Webmaster guidelines, it will likely trigger a manual review. EVERY spam report issued by people while logged into Google's Webmaster tools is reviewed without fail... Should your site trigger any type of manual review Google will likely discover what you are up to. This could get your own site banned or penalized. At a minimum they could easily devalue EVERY incoming 301 redirect to your site from other domains.

It's just not worth it unless you're willing to throw away all of the money you spent buying up those domains and risk having your real domain (target of the redirects) be penalized.

I have never understood why people would rather get to the top by being parasites... scamming to cheat the system and get there because of the work others have done rather than building something themselves that they can have pride in. It is ideas like this, spamming techniques, scams, etc. that makes Google change their algo constantly. And the people who have a legitimate reason to use some technique can't because of all of the people who have abused it in the past.

Thanks for the informative reply Canonical. I don't see SEO in a blackhat/whitehat light as the way you put it. Almost any commercial site worth their salt that wants to generate revenue is interested in achieving rankings by whatever means possible without risking penalization in any form. The whole notion of what's "spammy" or not is irrelevant, unless of course possible penalties may be applied.

You've raised some valid arguments, but I don't really see how a penalty could be applied as this would present a way for people to penalize their competition by simply 301 redirecting lots of blacklisted sites to them.

And I'm not sure what you mean by valuable sites not being given up often? High ranked domains are being dropped every minute. Any domain drop monitoring site such as freshdrop.net is a great place to pick them up.

Your first point is of course correct in theory, but let's assume the domain has keyword authority due to inlinks from sites such as dmoz.org and Yahoo Directory, which may rarely get manually reviewed. Top this off with old blog/forum posts, old SEO-links etc, and I'd be surprised if many of the links were to be removed.

So presuming that there would be no penalties, and that most of the links would remain, I'd be curious to hear what other potential flaws there may be in this theory.

I don't believe you can say it passes "all of that PR juice flow". You can have more than one 301 redirect to the same page when you have many ways to get to a page on your server, but, to have multiple different originating servers or sites, and especially large numbers of them being permanently redirected to another site is pretty uncommon.

It's also uncommon for this to happen all at once in the way it would if you bought them all at once.

Whatever effect this could have on pagerank, the effect is likely to be limited by the situation, at least if you only use one receiving page like you mentioned.

You may be able to have a greater effect by using multiple receiving pages to ensure the best chance that all redirections are recognized properly.

These pages then can in turn be linked in a certain way so you get a benefit.

The point is probably moot unless you have some strangely challenging objective such as wanting to dominate ranks 1 through 10 for a certain (less competitive) phrase...This kind of objective surfaces when you have negative blog posts about consumer complaints, or corporate watchdog sites coming up covering your company.

Long story short, this could only really work well for less competitive phrases....in which case, what's the real point?

You would only use this rarely anyway, for instance, if you wanted to brand an entire search page and get many ranks for the same search for a lesser competitive phrase.

Since the days when this technique might have been 'bragged about', it's likely Trustrank, other forms of distributed human-editing, green-lighting, filtering, and the increasing competitive environment for anchor text is more of a competitive concern.

In reality, for competitive search phrases, which are ones that have more than 30,000 to 40,000 occurrences of the phrase as anchors pointing to result pages on the entire web...(as an example, 'home loans' occurs in many hyperlinks from one site to another, 'Click here for home loans", would add to that count.)...

having anchor text pointing to your page is generally far more important.

I've recommended and used this kind of technique when working with a company to do anything to remove negative Google results. No way to isolate the results as we made many other changes in internal linking.

I also think it would be hard to line up the kinds of purchases you would need to sustain that kind of technique, but, some people are very resourceful. Seems like the time and links could be utilized in better ways in most cases.

Most notably, when you have a direct link to your site, instead of a link to a site redirected to your site, there is more of a chance of direct-transfer of anchor text authority to your page.

The only way I see this being a good idea is using it from one of your own pages, like, if you had some product promotion page that is no longer live, you could redirect it to another page you want to bump up. This would be from the same site.

Or, if you had some hard-to-position page, perhaps because other filters are effecting that page more than most (which happens when you are ranking other pages for the same phrase), you might use this (along with every other trick in the book) to solve a particularly hard-to-rank (but shouldn't be hard to rank, because it's not competitive) page.

There's also a big difference between turning an EXISTING OLD link into a 301 redirect to getting those aged links...

And, buying a NEW LINK or SITE, (with no aged link connecting this site or link to your page), and wanting to convert that instantly into a 301 redirect.

I'd try to do the former over the latter.

Thanks for the response Matt. That's sort of in-line with what I was thinking, although the concept does still intrigue me.

Instead of trying to manipulate pagerank, or any other SEO gimmick, everyone would spend their time better by creating relevant content. There is no secret to SEO... create good content, optimize your content, get a FEW high-quality links, and you will rank well. I think people are so obsessed with looking for the SEO magic bullet that they overlook the most important thing... content!

Interesting posts. I have wondered about this myself especially when I have heard stories of different people artificially inflating a sites PR using 301's