Google's John Mueller said that while 301 redirects are not seen by Google as links, the links pointing to the redirected page can pass through to the destination page. But 301s are primarily used for canonical purposes by Google he said.
John posted on Twitter, "No, we wouldn't count that [a 301 redirect] as a link." "It's more a helper with picking the canonical URL across a set of URLs," he added.
John added, "However, links to the redirecting URL could be seen as links to the redirection target."
Here are the tweets:
No, we wouldn't count that as a link. It's more a helper with picking the canonical URL across a set of URLs. However, links to the redirecting URL could be seen as links to the redirection target.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 1, 2019
Now we can get into the debate about 301s passing link signals versus 302s, and so forth. :)
Forum discussion at Twitter.
