Can redirecting a spammy site with less PageRank to a site with higher PageRank hurt?

Can redirecting a spammy site with less PageRank to a site with higher PageRank hurt? - If a page has internal and external outgoing links to redirecting URLs, it’s returning 3xx (301, 302, etc.) HTTP status codes standing for redirection. This issue means that the page does not exist on a permanent or temporary basis. It appears on most of the popular web browsers, usually caused by a misconfigured website. However, there are some steps you can take to ensure the issue isn’t on your side. You can find more details about redirecting URLs by reading the Google Search Central overview. In this article, we’ll go over how you can fix the Can redirecting a spammy site with less PageRank to a site with higher PageRank hurt? error on your web browser. Problem :

How does it affect a site with higher PageRank if a lower PageRank start redirecting (301) to it?

The lower ranked site has a spammy link profile and would like to shut it down, but it also has a lot of visitors. I would like to start redirecting it to another site with much higher rank.

Solution :

You don't want the weight placed by a search engine to carry over to the new website because along with it, will be transferred all the negative weight from low quality / spammy content/links etc.

In order to just refer legitimate traffic to the new website, you'd need to implement a 301 redirect and exclude search engine crawlers such as GoogleBot so that they do not get redirected to the new website. (So you'd be redirecting humans and not bots). You'd have to be wary of potential cloaking risks though.

Alternatively, could you not just display a notification or new page at your old website advising all visitors of the new website and ask them to visit that one instead?

A 301 redirect should be the correct thing to do. Here's a reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105?hl=en.

Make sure that you do not do a single redirect for all the pages but for one page at a time.

Definitely, you are going to lose your high PageRank site too. Google can easily detect that the traffic is coming from a spammy site, therefore the new hummingbird algorithm will classify your blog too in the list of spams, especially when you do a 301 redirect.
That doesn't mean that the high PageRank of your site will decrease.

You could possible do one thing. In the Google Webmaster Tools, try to file a manual spam action reverting. Delete all the spam posts in your blog and then try a redirect.

We hope that this article has helped you resolve the seo, redirects, pagerank error in your web browsers. Enjoy browsing the internet uninterrupted!