What You Need to Know About URL Redirection and Backlinks

A marketer wanted to know if a redirect impacts the back links when conducting search engine optimization (SEO) on a site. The original poster stated that they wrote and posted a press release. it was picked up by a reputable site. Only two days later, the link to the press release on the reputable site now just takes the visitor to the site's home page. The page still exists and does not issue a 404 error. The original poster wanted to know if the back link will still benefit them even though it no longer shows the content that they created.

One person wrote back and said that it will not benefit them if the content is no longer there. It will not exactly count against them, but it will also not do anything good for their search engine results placement or ranking on Google. Another person backed this statement up, stating that if the page redirects, the links and content are essentially no longer there, even though no error is delivered.

A different person commented to not redirect the back link to the home page. Instead, a 301 should be used in order to redirect it to similar content or an old article and redirect it to that. When Google does an evaluation, it considers a redirect to the homepage of a site to be a sort of soft 404 in terms of ranking. That soft 404 will prevent the writer of the content from gaining any SEO benefits from the information that had been contained within the content in the back link.

Another person simply stated that yes, it does impact SEO. Even if the particular page is taken down, the referring domain may still show in the Google Analytics. Even so, it will not deliver any type of an SEO benefit. One additional person added on to this, stating that it will no longer deliver any benefit to the user. However, that last commentator was wrong about how much of an impact it would have on the overall site and the site's generalized SEO campaign for Google. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/dtd8y9/doredirectsimpactbacklinksin_seo/.