You were told to execute a 301 Redirect. Can something like that hurt your site in the search engines?
Not, if done right. A 301 Redirect tells the search engine both that the page has “Moved Permanently” to a new location. As a result, all the PageRank and link reputation of the old page will be assigned to the new page.
So, doing a 301 redirect on a page will most definitely hurt the old page and help the new page. Simply, the new page will replace the old one in the SERPs. Note that, while the search engines sort things out in their databases, a short period of erratic ranking is to be expected. Ultimately, however, the “redirected to” page will take the position of the “redirected from” page.
Overall, a 301 redirect cannot harm, unless you mess it up. If you do mess it up, you get an “500 Internal Server Error” message and your site will become unavailable. This can be easily spotted and fixed by either removing the redirect or by correcting it.
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