If you have ever searched do redirects lose PageRank before planning a site move, the short answer from Google's current guidance is no, 301 redirects do not cause PageRank loss. That is not the same as a promise that your rankings or your traffic will stay exactly where they were. Earlier Google statements acknowledged some loss, a 2013 clarification compared redirects with ordinary links, and a 2016 statement said flatly that redirects no longer lose PageRank. The evidence for the no-loss position is strongly supported. The evidence for "nothing will change when you redirect a page" is a different claim, and it is not supported at all. This is also the root of the broader question of 301 redirect SEO value: the status code itself is not the risk people often assume it is.
Evidence grade: strongly supported, for the specific claim that 301 redirects do not inherently drain PageRank. If you take one thing from this piece, take the distinction it is built on: PageRank preservation and ranking preservation are not the same outcome, and Google's current documentation only promises the first one.
Where did the warning about redirect value come from?
The question of whether a 301 redirect is a ranking factor that works against a page, rather than a neutral technical step, is where most of this confusion starts.
The fear that a 301 redirect eats some of your page's value did not come out of nowhere. It traces back to a March 2010 interview that Eric Enge ran with Matt Cutts, reported by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable. Enge asked Cutts whether moving between domains could lose PageRank, since an external link pointing at the old URL would still point there after the move. Cutts was not sure at first. He said, "I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank," and admitted he was not 100 percent sure whether Google's crawling and indexing team had actually implemented that kind of decay. The write-up added a follow-up note saying Cutts later confirmed by email that there was some loss through a 301.
That is a real basis for the concern, not something SEO commentators invented. But notice what it is not. It is not a measured percentage, and it is not a description of what Google's systems do sixteen years later. It is one uncertain answer from one person, in one interview, about one specific scenario.
That uncertain answer became an industry rule anyway. Over the following years, "a 301 redirect loses some PageRank" turned into a widely repeated planning assumption, the kind of thing that ends up in a migration checklist without anyone checking where it came from or when.
What did Google actually clarify in 2013?
Three years later, the story got more specific, and this is the part most retellings get wrong. In a February 2013 video statement reported by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, Cutts said: "The amount of PageRank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a link." Read that sentence again, because the wording matters more than the headline that ran on top of it.
Cutts was not saying a 301 loses zero PageRank. He was saying a 301 loses the same amount a normal link loses, no more. "No extra loss compared with a link" and "no loss" are two different claims, and collapsing them is the single most common way this topic gets garbled. A normal link does carry some dissipation in how PageRank flows through a site. Cutts's point was that a redirect was not somehow worse than that baseline, not that the baseline itself was zero.
This is also where the old "redirects lose about 15 percent of their value" rule of thumb usually gets attached, and it is worth being precise about that attachment. The 2013 quotation that's commonly cited to support the 15 percent figure does not contain a number at all. It says the dissipation through a 301 and through a link were identical at that time. The 15 percent framing was an industry estimate layered on top of that statement, not something Cutts said in it. Treat the 15 percent figure as an old rule of thumb that circulated at the time, not as a measured Google penalty you should still be budgeting for.
What changed in Google's public guidance in 2016?
The clearest shift in Google's public language came in July 2016. Gary Illyes, a Google employee, stated publicly: "30x redirects don't lose PageRank anymore," a line reproduced in a Search Engine Land report published July 27, 2016. That wording covers the whole family of 30x redirects, including 301 and 302, and it does not hedge the way the 2013 statement did. Search Engine Land read it as a direct statement that redirects no longer dilute PageRank at all.
The day after Illyes's statement, John Mueller told Barry Schwartz something that reframed how to read the announcement itself. Mueller said Illyes was confirming existing behavior, not revealing a change, and that things had worked this way for "a while." In other words, July 26, 2016 is a reliable date for when Google said this publicly. It is not a reliable date for when Google's systems actually started working this way. Writing "Google removed the redirect penalty on July 26, 2016" overstates what the sources support; writing "in July 2016, Google explicitly confirmed that redirects no longer lost PageRank" does not.
There was also an earlier, narrower version of this statement. Moz's retrospective coverage, published August 1, 2016, reported that Mueller had said back in February that no PageRank is lost for 301 or 302 redirects used specifically when moving a site from HTTP to HTTPS. That is useful background, showing the no-loss position did not appear out of nowhere in July, but it was scoped to one migration scenario rather than stated as a general rule the way Illyes's comment was.
What does Google say now, and how strong is the evidence?
The strongest evidence for this article's verdict is not a 2016 statement at all. It is Google's own current documentation. Google's Site Moves and Migrations page, part of Google Search Central and last updated August 20, 2026, states plainly: "301 and other permanent redirects don't cause a loss in PageRank." That is not a reported quote filtered through a journalist. It is Google's maintained guidance, sitting in the documentation Google expects site owners to actually read before moving a page.
One caution on dates: August 20, 2026 is when that page was last updated, not proof that this exact sentence was added on that date or that Google's underlying behavior changed then. The page could have said the same thing for years. What matters for a reader today is that this is Google's current, standing position, not a retired statement that got overtaken by something newer.
Anyone who has typed do redirects lose PageRank into a search bar in the last few years has likely landed on some version of these same primary sources, which is part of why it is worth reading them directly rather than through a secondhand summary. Weighing the evidence on each side: the case for the old concern rests on a 2010 interview with an uncertain answer, a 2013 clarification about relative dissipation, and an industry rule of thumb that was never Google's own number. The case against treating automatic loss as today's reality rests on an explicit 2016 statement, a same-week clarification that the behavior predated the announcement, and current documentation that states the no-loss position directly. One category of evidence does not belong on either side: observational traffic stories. Moz's own August 2016 piece described a small site that moved domains and switched to HTTPS, where traffic went up rather than down, and Moz itself cautioned that one small case does not prove anything about the underlying mechanism. A traffic graph cannot isolate PageRank handling from everything else that changes during a move, including the HTTPS switch itself. Treat case studies like that as illustrations of why the fixed-loss assumption was being questioned, not as evidence you can cite as proof.
Why doesn't no PageRank loss mean unchanged rankings?
This is the part of the question that most advice skips past, and it is the reason "ranking value" is a slippery phrase to build a plan around. Google's own ranking-systems guide, last updated December 10, 2025, describes PageRank as one of several core ranking systems, one that has evolved substantially while remaining part of how Google ranks pages. PageRank is an input, not the whole system. Even a clean guarantee that PageRank itself survives a redirect intact says nothing about every other signal that factors into where a page lands.
The same Site Moves and Migrations documentation that states the no-loss position also tells site owners to expect temporary ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes a moved URL. Those two statements are not in tension with each other. One is about PageRank specifically; the other is about the ordinary mechanics of Google noticing a URL has changed, re-crawling it, and re-settling where it ranks. A page can keep its PageRank and still see its position wobble for a while simply because Google is still processing the change.
This is also the honest answer to the broader 301 redirect SEO value question: the value is in protecting what a page already earned, not in adding new strength. Redirect type still matters here too, even with PageRank loss off the table. Google's redirect documentation, last updated April 14, 2026, explains that a permanent redirect signals that the destination should become the new canonical URL, while a temporary redirect tells Google to follow the link without treating the destination as the new canonical choice. Google's canonicalization documentation, last updated July 10, 2026, describes redirects as a strong canonicalization signal that works alongside other signals. None of that is about PageRank dissipation. It is about which URL Google decides represents the page going forward, and getting that choice wrong by using the wrong redirect type for your intent is still a real way to create problems, just a different one than the old PageRank fear.
What should change in your redirect planning?
Stop treating a 301 redirect as a hidden 301 redirect ranking factor, something that quietly knocks a page down a few spots just by existing. Stop building content plans around a fixed, automatic PageRank discount for every redirect. Google's current documentation does not support that assumption, and the historical statements that get cited for it, read carefully, never supported a specific percentage either. If a migration plan or an SEO audit still carries a line item for "expected PageRank loss from redirects," it is working from an outdated or misread version of Google's position.
Audit redirects for the things that genuinely do function as a 301 redirect ranking factor in practice: redirect chains, a destination page that does not actually match what the old URL offered, or a temporary redirect left in place long after the move became permanent. At the same time, do not swing to the opposite assumption that a 301 makes a URL change risk-free. PageRank, rankings, and traffic are three different things, and Google's no-loss statement only covers the first one. Match your redirect type to your actual intent: a permanent redirect when the URL is genuinely changing for good, a temporary one when it is not, since that choice still shapes how Google treats canonicalization. And when inherited advice tells you to expect a specific loss number, ask what it is based on and when. A 2010 warning, a 2013 comparison, and 2026 documentation are answering different versions of the same question, and most of the confusion in this topic comes from treating them as interchangeable.
A fair planning sentence to carry forward: you should not assume a built-in PageRank loss from a permanent redirect, but you should also not promise your team identical search performance simply because that loss is not expected. The genuine unknowns that remain are narrower than they look. Google has not disclosed the exact date its systems stopped behaving the old way, has not published a full technical account of its ranking pipeline, and has not promised unchanged rankings for any individual site. What would actually change this verdict is new Google documentation that qualifies or walks back the current no-loss statement, or independent evidence that genuinely isolates the PageRank mechanism rather than just reporting a traffic change after a move.
Before you carry redirect advice into your next content plan or migration brief, check which version of Google's guidance it is actually based on.
