Does anchor text carry through 301 redirects?
Matt's answer:
Mharris from NY asks: Does anchor text carry through all 301 redirects? Will there be a penalty for sites that do this as their sole way of link building? Typically anchor text does flow through a 301 redirect, but we don’t promise that that will always happen. So the question is, does it carry through all? Not necessarily. We reserve the right to score not only in links and how we determine the weights and the trusts for links and also the trust that we have for redirects. I can tell you that if your sole method of link building is trying to get 301 redirects, that’s gonna be pretty conspicuous, because we have the, we log all the redirects that we see, just like we log all the links that we see, and so if all of your incoming anchor texts is through 301 redirects that’s gonna appear pretty strange, especially because whenever we go looking through our tools that would be a pretty abnormal thing to do. So my advice is make a great site that attracts links naturally because it’s a fantastic resource and don’t worry about “Oh, can i try to get some PR or anchor text in some way that search engines may not be able to catch or, you know, that other people may not be able to follow”, because if you get that organic,long term sort of links, the links that are given freely because you have a great resource,those are the links that typically last the best and have the most impact.
by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team
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