301 redirects and PageRank loss

In an interview with Eric Enge, our dear Matt Cutts announced the world that 301 redirects do not fully pass the PageRank from the old page to the new one...rocking the SEO world on its base and creating kind of small buzz..

Eric Enge: Let’s say you move from one domain to another and you write yourself a nice little statement that basically instructs the search engine and, any user agent on how to remap from one domain to the other. In a scenario like this, is there some loss in PageRank that can take place simply because the user who originally implemented a link to the site didn't link to it on the new domain?

Matt Cutts: That's a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).

Still 301 redirects are so far the best way of keeping the website history, rankings and traffic. The only thing Matt confirmed by saying there were a loss of PR is that the redirection process does not finish when the redirections are live. It finishes when the links which were pointing to the Old page are changed. (and it can take a loooong time).