301 Redirect - Best Practices Question

[luxer]

5 year old Woocommerce website with high PA/DA, Citation and Trust

On it there are products that are no longer in stock yet they have hundreds of links pointing to the url still. Lets say I have a similar product that can be listed. But I need to change the url to reflect the new products name.

Will a redirect to the new similar product carry the link juice over effectively or will this possibly cause a penalty?

What is the best practice for a situations like this. Normally I would keep the old url, but in this particular case I can not.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Since Google started pushing the HTTPS agenda, they found people were resistant to making the switch because 301 redirects acted as normal links, meaning you'd lose some portion of your juice and thus rankings after the switch.

Lot's of people jumped when Google said jump and found their rankings suffered. That slowed down the industry's willingness to switch old sites over to HTTPS.

So Google claimed to have changed 301's to no longer lose link juice, across the board. Is that really for all 301's or just HTTP to HTTPS? Who knows, but people are no longer reporting ranking losses now.

I'd do the 301 either way if it's a matter of 100's of links sending 100% juice to a page that makes me zero money. I'd rather have 100's sending 75% juice to a page that can make me cash. But it may be 100% now with the change to 301's.

All you can do is give it a whirl. In this case it seems like a no-brainer if you look at it from the angle of earnings.

 

[luxer]

I have never been one to jump when Google says jump, usually I try to do the opposite. Thank you Ryuzaki this is a great answer.