Dangerous 301 Linking

You may know that Google and other search engines look at 302 redirects in a non-friendly kind of way. The reason is that there have been so many Black Hat SEO techniques that have taken advantage of HTTP 302 redirect method. But can you get in trouble for using 301 redirects?

The answer is yes and no. The right way to use HTTP 301 redirect is by redirecting pages that will be permanently pointing to another location. For instance, if you want http://www.X.com to always go to http://www.Y.com, then you can use a 301 redirect to avoid getting penalized for duplicate content, had you used frame redirects. But of course, there are situation where you may want to use 302 redirects. Let’s say that you have a website: http://www.x.com. But your website actually lives on http://www.x.com/XYZ. If you 301 redirect the first location to the second location, you will be probably listed on Google as http://www.x.com/XYZ. It may not be a big deal for you, but it definitely would look better on search results to have the first option.

301 redirects can be used in Black Hat ways as well. Many black hats do this by creating content and using it as link bait. In order to gather links, they will create a bogus domain and get all the links to that location. Once they have gathered enough inbound links, they will 301 redirect the page to where they want the links to point to passing link juice in the process. This technique sounds acceptable on the paper, but the intentions behind it are not. Should you do this? I have personally seen many SEOs that have used this technique for some quick hits, but be very careful as you may get penalized if your hand is revealed.