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A redirect from one page to an entirely different page will result in no PageRank being passed and will be considered a soft 404.

the 301 redirect will pass 100% PageRank only if the redirect was a redirect to a new page that closely matched the topic of the old page.

Is there any link equity loss from redirect chains?

If you have your site set to detect a visitor's location and show content based on that, I would recommend the following: Serve a unique URL for distinct content. For instance, don't show English content to US visitors on mysite.com and French content to French visitors on mysite.com. Instead, redirect English visitors to mysite.com/en and French visitors to mysite.com/fr. T hat way search engines can index the French content using the mysite.com/fr URL and can index English content using the mysite.com/en URL. Provide links to enable visitors (and search engines) to access other language/country content. For instance, if I'm in Zurich, you might redirect me to the Swiss page, but provide a link to the US version of the page. Or, simply present visitors with a home page that enables them to choose the country. You can always store the selection in a cookie so visitors are redirected automatically after the first time.

Google's policies aren't as inflexible as you're trying to portray. The same Google page you quote also says that intent ought to be a major consideration (just as when evaluating pages with hidden content). Also, why would Google's guidelines prevent you from using geotargeting without an immediate redirect? Just because you don't immediately redirect search users to a different page doesn't mean you have to ask for their zip code instead of using IP-based geotargeting.    Lastly, I don't think using such redirects from SERPs improves user experience at all. If I click on a search result, then it's because that's the content I'm interested in. It's very annoying to click on a search result and get a page completely different from the SERP snippet. And what about someone who is on business in a different country? Search engines already provide different language localizations as well as language search options to favor localized pages for a particular region. So if someone goes to the French Google, they will see the French version of localized sites/pages. If they're seeing the U.S. version in their SERP, then it's because you didn't SEO or localize your pages properly, or they deliberately used the U.S. version of Google. Don't second guess your users. Instead, focus on making sure that users know about your localized pages and can access them easily (by choice, not through force).5 days ago, 17:00:11 – Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate Bill Hunt Frank your spot on as usual. We still keep chasing this issue and as I wrote on SEW last year in my article on language detection issues http://searchenginewatch.com/3634625 it is often more of the implementation that is the problem than the actual redirect.    Yes, it is exactly cloaking (maybe gray hat) when you have a single gateway such as "example.com" and if the person comes from Germany they see the site in German language or English if their IP was in New York. Engines typically crawl from a central location like Mountain View or Zurich so they would only see the English version since they would not provide signals for any other location. Where you really get into a tricky area is if you set it so that any user agent from a search engine can access any version they are asking for and let them in yet a human is restricted - sort of reverse cloaking. If Mr GoogleBot wants the French home page let him have it rather than sending him to the US homepage.    With the growth of CDN's (content data networks) I am seeing more and more of these issues crop up to handle load balancing as well as other forms of geographical targeting. I have a long list of global, multinational and enterprise related challenges that are complicated by many of Google's outdated ways of handling kindergarten level spam tactics. Sounds like a SES New York session...

Although permanently redirecting your URLs using 301 redirects is sufficient for Bing to understand that you want the new URLs to be indexed instead of the old ones and this normally happens automatically, the Site Move tool can help expedite this process.

September 30, 2009 Feedburner Goes All Permanent on Their URL Redirects If you've ever clicked on a link in your RSS reader and that link is associated with a site that uses Feedburner, you've probably noticed that the initial URL to appear in your browser's address bar was related to the feed and not the final URL. That's because Feedburner uses the URL to track the click. The redirect was a 302, a temporary redirect. But now Feedburner is updating the URLs to be permanent 301 redirects. Feedburner, which is owned by Google, says that the reason for the change was that some search engines index the feeds, which affects the popularity of a site. If you use Feedburner, you don't have to do anything special. The update is automatic.

Link Redirect Trace — Uncovers all URLs in a redirect chain including 301’s, 302’s, etc. Very useful for finding (and regaining) lost “link juice,” amongst other things.Other similar extensions: Redirect Path

Scraper — Scrape data from any web page using XPath or jQuery. Integrates with Google Sheets for one-click export to a spreadsheet. Or you can copy to clipboard and paste into Excel.Other similar extensions: Data Scraper — Easy Web Scraping, XPather

Tag Assistant (by Google) — Check for the correct installation of Google tags (e.g. Google Analytics, Tag Manager, etc) on any website. Also, record typical user flows on your website to diagnose and fix implementation errors.

The one thing you should definitely avoid is redirecting many images on a page. This will severely slow down page load time, especially on high-latency networks (e.g. phone, China, satellite internet) where each new HTTP request takes a long time. Also, HTTP clients are limited to a small number of simultaneous HTTP connections per server hostname, so even on fast networks you'll end up with a bottleneck. Redirecting 1 or 2 images on a page is not a big deal, however.

if you have clients that really want to remove redirects for whatever reason, if the redirect is live for a year or more, it is safe to do so from an SEO perspective specific to Google Search. More importantly, if the redirect is removed over time because of just normal maintenance and it has been a year, you still do not need to worry.

A. Create a landing page with dedicated content, letting the users know that the info is not available anymore on that page, but they can access similar data in some other place.   B. 301 redirect – is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to a page with correct info. A 301 redirect is a permanent one which passes the link juice and equity to the redirected page.

Archives such as Wayback Machine or Warrick can help you recover the original content

By analyzing the source domain name that’s part of the migration, you can view urls that Googlebot is coming across that end up as 404s. And that can help you find gaps in your 301 redirection plan.

Although there’s a lag in the data populating (3-4 days), the Crawl Stats reporting can sure help surface problems during domain name changes and url migrations