Dawn Anderson asked Google’s John Mueller if redirecting a non-relevant page would cause the destination page (where the redirect it going towards) to be less relevant and cause any ranking issues for its relevant queries. John said no, “I can’t think of a way that would have a negative effect there,” he added.

The conversation was on Mastodon and here is what Dawn asked:

John Mueller replied:

The second part of his answer is also interesting, about the short-term ranking of redirected target pages – but I wouldn’t get bogged down by that part.

One note, redirects from non-relevant pages could be seen as soft 404s by Google, Glenn Gabe did a case study on it and it jives with the redirect soft 404s we covered here numerous times.

Forum discussion at Mastodon.