How Do 301 Redirects of Domain Names Impact SEO Rankings?

I recently received a question from a client who just purchased a slew of new domain names with new TLD’s (top-level domain) and asked me to setup 301 redirects to his main site. His question to me after the redirects were made …. how does this affect my SEO?

Our SEO and Internet Marketing Director, Alex DiSebastian provided the following answer:

Direct match domains are great to have from an SEO perspective. Google scans every website from the top down so one of the first things that it always looks at is the domain name. That said, Google knows that domains are easily purchased these days and because of this, they don’t way massive amounts of their algorithm into them. We can, and we should, set up the redirects for these domains to go directly into the respective pages of your website but I again, would not want you to think that it would massively affect rankings.

So, do 301 redirects affect your SEO? No, not really.