The Little 301 That Could

Nelson Minar, another Google employee, recently moved his site with a 301. I’ve heard reports of problems moving a site with 301s, so I’m glad it worked fine for him.

Let’s see, where are we? Jagger wrapped up by about November 18th. I tried to impress on folks at Google that to the extent possible, you don’t want to make major shake-ups to the index during the holiday shopping season, so people should either launch their changes relatively early (e.g. like Jagger), or try to hold off until after the holiday season is winding down. Sometimes you don’t really have a choice because something is ready to go, but post-Jagger I think things were pretty quiet in the index this past month.

We’re getting closer to calling for feedback on 64.233.179.104 66.249.93.104, but I probably won’t ask for reactions for another week or two. Right now that datacenter isn’t serving traffic 100% of the time as people pull it out of the rotation from time to time to tune things up under the hood. That data center has some infrastructure that I think in time will work better for canonicalization and redirects. We also recently improved site: to show slightly more logical urls as well.

Update: We’ve opened up feedback on the Bigdaddy data center, but the preferred location is 66.249.93.104. Edited the post to reflect that.

75 Responses to The Little 301 That Could (Leave a comment)

  1. I checked 64.233.179.104 but got duplicate result from same domain.

  2. So did I, and yes I know you don’t want comments or feedback yet, but the preliminary results are very encouraging.

    If you keep going on the path you seem to be on, and once you get the spam lowered to a dull roar, you’ll be all set.

  3. Many conspiracy theories abound. One interesting one is the last 3 (or more maybe, but at least) years google has done a major algo change prior to the holiday season. Amazingly enough many webmasters must then turn to google adwords to boost their falling sales. Coincidence? Probably! But many think this!

  4. Very encouraging Matt. I believe you addressed only 301s and Canonicals on the test DC? Looks very good and a thunbs-up from here.

    Liked what I saw when I searched http://www.dmoz.org. Got it exactly right.

  5. Glenn,
    in Google’s defense: they do major changes every 3 months or so, so it is inevitable that the season would be affected one way or another. If they did it in September, people would be complaining that their entire season is ruined, if Google changed their algo in November the complaint would that the timing was to close to December. For the record: my site got slammed October 5th or so and would have loved to have a great Christmas season, but what can I do.

  6. Matt, speaking of canonical URLs, I just linked to http://mattcutts.com/blog from my blog since I know you appreciate that kind of stuff 🙂

    It’s actually funny. You have a PR7 and a PR4 depending on the www or no www stuff.

  7. I am not sure if the ranking currently is affected by the corrections employed to 301s and canonicals on the test DC. May be Matt would like to throw some light on it. But it sure is a good beginning.

  8. Hi Matt.

    I know you get a ton of these, so I will try for brevity.

    I’m hoping that my niche of “wine” will interest you on a personal level and that I can ask your professional opinion about my site.

    LocalWineEvents.com is a calendar of food and wine related events around the world by city.
    http://www.LocalWineEvents.com

    I am a wine guy, not a SEO guy, but I have been a supporter at WMW for some time as I learned enough to NOT do damage to my sites position in the SERPs.

    Overall I rank pretty well for “[[city]] + wine” searches and if you add “dinner” or “tasting” to that, I’m almost always number one.
    What sort of sticks in my craw, though, is for the keyword search “wine”. I have hovered in the mid to low twenties for “wine” for the past several years, relatively unaffected by any of the major updates, but I can’t figure out what I’m missing that might move my site up.

    A part of me thinks that when someone just says “wine”, what do they mean? Do they want to buy it, learn it, etc.? Who knows? But, if someone IS interested in wine, they WILL look at LocalWineEvents.com.

    So, I’m asking you, is there something that I can or should be doing with LocalWineEvents.com that might help it fare better in the SERPs for the search on “wine”?

    I thank you for your time, Matt and enjoy reading your postings. I’m not looking for link love from your blog, so if you have any input, you can email me from the site instead of making this comment public.

    Thanks.

    EVO
    http://www.LocalWineEvents.com

  9. Our site did terrible in Jagger but things are looking much, much better on 64.233.179.104… looks great to us 🙂

  10. Hi matt
    I always wonder about Google calling for feedback. Of course its nice to see Google wanting to work with webmasters but i do wonder what you guys are actually lookng for. I and many others have made feedback and spam reports and comments about spam results but I have never seen any of these sites lose position. I mean basic hidden text which makes up the entire content of a page is left even after feedback. So sometimes i wonder exactly what the benefit to the webmaster is of providing feeback and identifying the seo sections of the serps?

    Thanks
    (do appreciate the blog, Google leads and yahoo copies, ooops i mean follows!)

  11. I have a 302 problem on Google UK, but the datacenter above seems to credit the correct URL, rather than the .gov site directory URL it was recently added to. Certainly encouraging. 🙂

  12. Matt – I wish 301s worked that well for the rest of us! I have one site in particular that just got slammed back to the old domain about a week after I *thought* Google had it figured out. This has been going on for months and I’m at the point where I think it would be better to just kill the old domain and start from scratch but it shouldn’t have to be this way!

    I followed the same protocol as Nelson with very different results. I have also attempted to contact Google’s service department with no response.

    The whole experience is documented at seo chat if anyone is interested. It’s just frustrating to see a company that excells in so many way’s be way behind the “other guys” in this regard. Also, for a company with the technology to add pages to an index within minutes, it seems strange the new domain name can’t be figured out.

  13. Matt Cutts wrote: “Jagger wrapped up by about November 18th.”

    Telling earlier when the Jagger Update was over in your blog would have been cool, because I like to report using links to authority sources about the start and end dates of Google Updates so other people reading forums like Google Groups can see even years later how long it usually takes for an Update to accomplish. In Google Groups you can’t reply to posts older than one month, so I can’t post a follow-up to my thread about the Jagger Update. Oh well. Maybe you have told the end date of the Jagger Update in one of your previous blog posts, but in that case I didn’t see it.

  14. 64.233.179.104 seems to have less spam on some keywords I’m monitoring. Also, the websites with hidden text and deceptive doorways seem to be removed (or placed on a 10ish page in SERPs).

    Oh, and Merry Xmas from Portugal Matt!

  15. Yeah I had the canonical problem with noslang.com a while ago.
    All my sub pages had a PR of 5, but the main page had a 0 or 3 depending on the way you accessed it.

    For a while, a site:www.noslang.com wasn’t even showing my index, but all other pages were there..

    I changed the .htaccess file to use 301 from the non-www to the www and my pagerank 5 came right back.

  16. I agree Rand. Nine weeks later and Google still has the old URL fully indexed and returning results from that domain rather than the new one. I too thought that Google had it figured out… After about a week it looked like the old URL was de-indexed, but about a week later everything went back to the old URL in the search results where it has stayed for the last eight weeks.

    MSN figured it out fairly quickly but Yahoo and Google are still confused.

  17. Hi Matt,

    I have a question about something I see on that DC. On a particular keyword search, I can see a domain that should be there, but the link has an affiliate link instead of the “true” domain. I have seen this kind of thing beofre on MSN and would like to know why an affiliate link would be included in a non affilaite site.

    An example of what I mean:

    Keyword “widgets”

    Link in question:

    http://www.widgets.com/subpage/entry.asp?affiliate=1212

    (keep in mind widgets.com is owned by the company that the affiliate is trying to promote, but for the sake of it, lets call the affiliate page gadgets.net)

    This is something that I am hoping does not happen on a regular basis because if you think about it, that affiliate ID will be receiving money for doing absolutley nothing for that term other than having their affiliate ID indexed on a website they do not own.

    If you have any kind of insight on why that would occur, I would very much like to know. Like I have stated, this is something that seems to happen on MSN alot, but this is kind of new for google, with regards to the site i am talking about.

    Thank you.

    Mike

  18. Good evening Matt

    Very generous weather report. By your encouraging post about 301 and canonical issues, you have brought today the best X-Mas gifts to many webmasters who have been affected by the said issues.

    Looking forward to BigDaddy 🙂

  19. Hey Matt, I moved one of my applications two months ago from kbcafe.com to r-mail.org. I was willing to put up with not being indexed, cause I’m in a long term game here. Anyhow, you mentionned about 301 and thought I’d bring it up. Seems to be some mistery around getting new domains indexed [http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ar%2Dmail%2Eorg].

  20. I do have to say that I like the fact that fewer interior pages seem to be showing up. I always felt that the interior pages weren’t really that helpful and pushed good sites below the fold or onto the second page. If that stays I will be happy.

  21. Quote: 64.233.179.104 seems to have less spam on some keywords I’m monitoring. Also, the websites with hidden text and deceptive doorways seem to be removed (or placed on a 10ish page in SERPs).Quote

    I dont see this on the test server. For the phrase Las Vegas Real Estate the number 1 site and the #7 site showing up on the test server have doorway pages all over the place.

    The #7 site which is an older domain in just the last several months has over 36k in backlinks showing up in YaWho : ) One can only assume they are purchased since I found several but to mention a few from a Womens forum in the footer and a Quilt Forum with anchor text of Las Vegas Real Estate in the footer of the forum. Now you have to ask yourself is this something Google is overlooking because of the age of the sites?

    The number 1 site for that term in Google has multiple doorway pages plus a major link farm on the homepage with over 150 links spamming keywords but is also a older domain created in 2000 I believe. Matt please correct me if I am wrong but it seems that Google is not paying attention to older domains that violate Googles TOS and has overlooked the sites that are old.

    Now I dont want to sound like a little baby but if Google expects us all to play by the rules then why is Google allowing certain type sites to break these rules. To me age does not mean a site is reputable. I believe that if Google looks at just the sites in Las Vegas for real estate and you use those nasty little tools you have, you might be surprised at what you find.

    Its not just Las Vegas but the real estate industry as a whole is as bad as the porn industry for bad seo practices. I for one and not just for my site but would wish that Google wouldnt give so much weight to the age of a domain, cause I can tell you from what I believe anyway if these domains were not as old as they are they would be removed from googles index.

    Thanks for listening to my christmas wish list. Have a great Holiday Matt you and your family, Plus cats : )

  22. I don’t see that effect at all. If anything, I tend to see a bit of the opposite effect. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t have a big problem with that.

    Interior pages aren’t as optimized for generic keywords/phrases as the home page, generally speaking. So if they start turning up because of “organic SEO”, that’s cool. As long as I can find the stuff I want when I want, and I usually can, then it’s good by me.

    My own thought would be that the next major update should be another attack on spam and scum. Either algorithmically or manually, I don’t care, as long as the shit gets flushed down the proverbial toilet.

  23. Mr. McCarley, we have to get different names – my own staff was asking why I posted “your” comments. Hard to explain that there’s someone else using that name 🙂

  24. Randy Charles Morin, looks like you grabbed r-mail.org in Nov. 2005. Looks like there might have been some seaminess with r-mail.org before you owned it though. Now that the domain is clean, I’ll put in a reinclusion request.

  25. McMohan, glad if it looks like an improvement to you. There are already some improvements, but there’s also a win to be gotten just because the infrastructure is newer/better and good foundation for future progress.

    Ryan, I noticed that I return a 200 status code for both www and non-www pages a while ago. I’m leaving it that way so I can be a guinea pig for future canonicalization tests. 🙂

    Tomi Häsä, I thought I said it somewhere, but sorry not to have given a more definitive “Jagger is done” post.

  26. Looks ok but my only complaint is still one real crap site on a keyword I showed Matt ages ago that seems to only get relevance from DMOZ.

    It’s nice to see one directory can still be weighted so heavily as to manipulate the results.

  27. Hmm got some nice ranks in there 🙂

  28. Not really a complaint but more of an observation. I looked at the new data center and did a site:discount-tickets.us check. I must say I’m confused. For a few weeks I worked on some new pages and then uploaded them all to my site. I then went through after a few days and deleted some I found to be not of use or irrelavent. Looking at the results I see the pages I deleted are all indexed and the ones that I kept are not. This is confusing to me as they were all linked from the same main page.

    The jagger update also knocked me out from number one down to number 33 for my main keywords. Instead of complaining I just redesigned my site from the ground up adhering to the webmaster guidelines, and am now holding my breath that google will see fit to have my site in the position it deserves.

    First time poster, with great respect for you and your expertise.

  29. I’m impressed with the results. I have a number of sites that have 301/302 redirects that seem to look better in that DC compared to the others. Plus all of my pages have descriptions/titles back with them where as before (in other words still on the existing DCs) it would merely show the url for pages that had been 301/302ed.

  30. Hi Matt

    Yes, thanks very much for a per X-mas weather report on this DC 🙂 🙂

    I would echo what Mcmahon has said – the situation with 301s, canonicals seems a lot better – but the sites which have suffered from this problem dont seem to have any rank (eg also my comment re Mozilla Googlebot crawling and the amount of pages that make the index)

    You talked about site ordering – sites which typically have this problem still have a problem with site ordering.

    However, it is nice to see my homepage returned for a search for my company name – even if it is in the 500-600s out of 800 returned 😉

    Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.

    Thanks

    Stephen

  31. Matt

    Just again quickly on the site ordering – I dont know if this is significant or not – what typically happens to sites with probs is that the homepage is in position 2-9 – so close to the top ten – while the number 1 page is always an internal.

    On a sidenot – shortly after Jagger – the site ordering was much better for more sites that I monitor – but these results only lasted a week or so.

    Thanks

    Stephen

  32. Hi Matt,
    I was complaining like crazy about the google results here in Germany since the last update (Jagger3) – sending lots of spam reports and reports for irrelevant results.
    The new 64.233.179.104 datacenter looks much better! Clear results! Hope you guys will get it up quickly!

    Greetz, Alexander

  33. I was hit hard in Jagger update as well. I am loving the results of http://64.233.179.104/.

    Happy Holiday Matt.

  34. Thanks Matt! You’re the best.

  35. Regarding http://64.233.179.104/, our website only has the non-www version listed (which is and has been for a long time, 301 redirected from non-www to www), only 7 of the available 10 pages, they are still htm version (the php version has been online for 2 months with a 301 redirect from the htm version) and are listed as supplemental results. The normal http://www.google.com shows 4 of the php pages, 7 of the non-www htm pages and the htm pages are listed as supplemental. Googlebot comes to our site frequently, spiders the pages ok but the index takes a long time to update. Just as comparison, Yahoo! updated almost immediately and does NOT show any of the non-www pages. Not meant as a complaint, just feedback from a legitimate business looking to place well in Google…

    Besh wishes for a happy holiday season,
    Brent

  36. One really odd thing that I noticed, and I’m not sure if this is a side effect of testing or a much larger database (I suspect the former):

    How come the “approximation” of results is usually about 2-5x higher than it is on the live DCs? Just curious.

  37. 64.233.179.104: Much better, for a highly competitive term, a site was in the 5 and 6 spot with same page indexed as: /default.aspx and com/. That is cleaned up and the lucky no 11 site is now in top 10.

    We put up a 301 from non to www about 3 weeks ago on a Windows IIS and everything worked out great.

  38. Will old Googlebot/2.1 be off duty soon?
    I don’t see it hardly any more. 64.233.179.104 has more recent Mozilla-bot-only crawled stuff. Mozillabot now uses If-modifed-since – it did not before – and IMO is now doing old 2.1’s tasks.

  39. Adam, I would guess that the “test” site doesn’t have as many of the spam sites / dual content sites etc blacklisted… as that would provide a more accurate test of whether or not it properly blocks stuff.

  40. Matt, so you are saying that 301s should no longer be a problem? Or are already not a problem? I hope this is the case, even though I have no re-directs at the moment.

  41. Ryan,

    That was a good call. I hadn’t thought of all of it. I did think of it being a spam tester, but not a duplicate content tester.

    Thanks.

  42. Several years ago our site switched domains, and the person in charge of it (regrettably, me) didn’t do it correctly. Since that time we’ve re-configured things properly with a 301, but Google refuses to index us! We’re #1 on Yahoo! and #2 on MSN for our name, but in Google we have to pay for an ad in order for anyone to see us.

    I’ve even followed Matt’s earlier instructions on filing a reinclusion request, to no avail. Any ideas?

  43. Matt,
    We moved some directories using a 301 many months ago (4-5). How come the old location of the pages show up in the supplementals? Just curious how soon these will flush out? There have been multiple updates over the past few months. I would figure that these would cycle out of the system and be gone. Just curious.

    Thanks.

  44. I see the following on 64.233.179.104
    For a pharmaceutical term the spam is just as big as on any other DC.
    From 110 pages I have only 70 indexed.
    A PHPBB forum of mine have for site:www.domain.com only the index listed followed by 3,000 Supplemental Results.

    Nor very promising for me.
    Merry Christmas.

  45. For the first time in months, the new results on the test site are actually showing the relevant page for my site for the search term again. (before, pages were not showing up due to canonical/dupe content problem, or were showing different pages on different DC’s) The pages showing on this DC more accurately reflect the content and look very good for anyone who wants to search for green widgets and actually get a page about green widgets. Neat. 🙂

  46. Data center looks great, hats, stetsons and turbans off to the google crew for tackling this issue.

  47. the results from the test DC are so much better.. I really hope google implements this one soon

  48. Matt,

    Can you blog an indication of when this new index may go live and spread to the other data centers?

    Nice looking results by the way.

  49. I hope that the results showing on 64.233.179.104 eventually work their way into the other DC’s.

    Matt, thanks for the good news.

  50. Matt,

    Happy belated Christmas. Glad yours was fun. Well setting up a computer can be fun…

    Anyway got a 301 related question. Site got migrated to a new cms. The old site data is not available. The client now is wondering why a high percent of traffic is 404’s.

    This would be becuse they didn’t want to engage the 301 service on legacy links, which we offered at the beginning of the contract. But I digress…

    I need to gather all the pages and extract the urls that Google has indexed for this client.

    The site:www.domain.com is TMI – i just need the links and every off the shelf program I have tried to use to extract links from a Google search is not working. Copy and paste of 27,000+ url’s into an xls is not my idea of having fun.

    Got any ideas / solutions?

    Thanks and best to you and yours,

    Tom Lynch
    Not a Coder…

  51. Matt,

    Great site, just found it and I’ve soaking in all the great info.

    Looks like the good results disappeared yesterday some time. More testing perhaps? Can we have the other ones back? My keywords now show lots of non-relavant results like a steak house on the first page for IT related keywords.

  52. I loved what I was seeing from http://64.233.179.104/ — our site was finally listed, afterbeing shut-out since a badly managed domain name change in early 2004. But then I checked it again today, and POOF! we’d disappeared again.

    Wish I knew why. So much for looking forward to this index spreading to the others. Sigh.

  53. Hi Matt,

    Since I noticed that the version at the test DC seems to have gone live, I’ve also noticed one strange behaviour that may be leading to inadvertent duplicate content penalties.

    I’ve noticed that, on sites hosted on IIS servers, http://www.domain.com/ABC.html is treated as a different page than http://www.domain.com/abc.html when they’re both the same.

    I realize that on some servers, they are different, but if a site clearly has a set of pages whereby case sensitivity doesn’t matter and it’s obvious, that site probably shouldn’t be punished.

    One of my clients (the one that happens to have been hit hardest by this) is in this boat, so I’ve recoded the site accordingly (using 301 redirects to send all the upper/lowercase URLs to straight lowercase URLs), so I’ll see what happens in this regard (and if you want, report back) once you guys pick up the change.

  54. Hi Matt,

    Just having a panic about 302/301. Which to use?

    We have many affiliate links that use 302 redirects to link to the affiliate site.

    E.g. http://www.ourdomain.com/aff/affsite links to http://www.affsite.com/index10?xy=1234
    using a 302 redirect.

    I’ve read on many SEO blogs that Google now deems 302’s to be bad and we’ll be penalized. Is this true? If so how are we supposed to use affiliate links?

  55. I added a new URL several months ago but it was still not indexed.
    The site was before listed as http://www.fralenuvol.it with Pagerank 6 and
    moved to http://www.fralenuvol.com.
    Since I moved, the (.it) progressively disappeared from listings, but
    the (.com) was never indexed.
    At the beginning, I just put in place a 303 permanent redirect.
    But seeing that nothing happened, I thought maybe Google was
    considering the new URL as a mirror site, so I removed fralenuvol.it
    through Google remove url procedure.

    Finally Google answered saying “your page has been blocked
    from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank”.

    But it is not possible to get further details.

    Consider the following points:
    1) New site url is: http://www.fralenuvol.com
    2) the site is well formed, good contents, and right keywords, exactly
    the same as the first one
    3) The new site is already linked from other sites with a good
    Pagerank.
    4) I already know the Webmaster documentation on Google, and nothing
    seems to explain the problem, and trying to get anywhere in contact
    with Google, it seems impossible to get a HUMAN (not automatic) answer
    about reading the documentation.

    Can somebody help me?

    Thanks in advance,
    Francesco Castronovo

  56. Sorry, before I meant a 301 permanent redirect (not 303)

  57. What if a company which owns some portals, all with a lot of traffic and with an high PR, decides to transfer all the singles domains of the network under an unique domain, creating in some way an unique great portal with many subdomains?
    In this case, should we use 301 permanent redirect, to allow main domain to gain the PR and the link popularity from the old domains?
    The change will be that:

    Old domains:
    http://www.olddomain1.com
    http://www.olddomain2.com
    http://www.olddomain3.com

    New domain, already existent with the corporate site on it:
    http://www.maindomain.net

    http://www.olddomain1.com —-> olddomain1.maindomain.net
    http://www.olddomain2.com —-> olddomain2.maindomain.net
    http://www.olddomain3.com —-> olddomain3.maindomain.net

    Using a 301 redirect, does the subdomains get PR, link popularity and google keywords ranking positions?

    Thanks in advance,
    Alex

  58. I am facing the same problem of splitting up my website into two websites, located on the same server.

    I am much more concerned about my keyword rankings then PR.

    Does anybody have experienced a short drop in SERPS when used a redirect 301?

  59. Assuming your site does a 301 redirect from http://www.site.com to site.com, does it affect your rankings if sites link to you with www vs no www?

  60. Is there something inherently “bad” about non www. web pages? When Analytics came out the inadverdent www and non www urls within our site could cause the tracking cookie to lose the visit data. Analytics keyword ROI data is critical for us. Since a lot of people don’t type www in urls we edited all our urls to non www and did a proper 301 redirect with mod_rewrite. We weren’t considering how Google or any other search engine had us indexed when we made this change. Of course, we should have done so.

    Everything I read NOW on WMW or SEW says “choose WWW”. My understanding is that Google would transfer the PR of 301 redirects if done properly. When that will happen for my site I don’t know, but it hasn’t happened so far. The point of this post is not about my PR. I focus on tweaking my PPC advertising, not organic SEO. I just want to know if search engines, including Google, are inherently prejudiced PR-wise against non www pages and sites for any reason?

  61. Matt, I created a new domain for an existing sub-domain and did a blanket 301 redirect to the new location (that was over 3 months ago). The sub-domain was a solid PR 4, and now still 0 PR after over 3 months for the new domain. Why did I get slammed so hard by Google for doing this properly as I understand it?
    PS: This did not effect my traffic from the other big 2 search engines.

  62. Matt,
    What does google perfer?

    Redirect permanent

    or

    Redirect 301

  63. I set up a 301 Off-Domain redirect for an uniportant page on my website which is ranking NO.1 for a non competitive keyword.

    Two weeks later Google catched up with the 301 redirect. I wondered which site does show up for the same keywords search. The old sites page or the new, off domain located page (off domain and also located in a different IP range)

    What happend was: The Google keyword search for the same keyword showed up my old domain, just with another page.

    After two months the new domain showed up, ranked No. 40 for the main domain. The old domain name still is ranking No.1. The new domains particular page does not show up at all.

    Fazit: 301 redirect to another domain will not prevent your new site from ranking high on Google.

    My solution: Keep your existing pages indexed! Especially if you rank well for a good keyword.

    To a keyword related redirect. Which means if a user lands on the page, check for the server variables. They will tell you from where the user is coming from. If has searched Google for your targeted keyword, to a redirect. This way the Google spiders still index your old site, but users which are searching your site with the targeted keyword are automatically redirected.

  64. Can some one answer my question about Reversing a 301 Redirect

    ————————————————————

    Suppose you used a 301 redirect for a page you had moved. At a later date, you end up with a page using the old url that has now been redirected. If you remove the 301 from your .htaccess file that should be enough to stop the redirection but how about the search engines? Will they once again eventually index this page once the 301 redirect is removed or is it “Permanent”?

  65. When Analytics came out the inadverdent www and non www urls within our site could cause the tracking cookie to lose the visit data. Analytics keyword ROI data is critical for us. Since a lot of people don’t type www in urls we edited all our urls to non www and did a proper 301 redirect with mod_rewrite.

  66. Here is an article that I have found useful about 301 redirects. I hope this helps you:
    http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm

  67. My understanding is that Google would transfer the PR of 301 redirects if done properly. When that will happen for my site I don’t know, but it hasn’t happened so far. The point of this post is not about my PR. I focus on tweaking my PPC advertising, not organic SEO.

  68. I have installed a redirection script (301 redirects) called power red. My google traffic has been increased wit 30% and PR has been changed from 0 to 3

    I’m not 100% sure if the redirect script has caused it but i’m happy with it.

  69. Here are 2 different ways to 301 Redirect on Apache. Thanks for all the inside info matt.. I love your blog!

    301 Redirects with mod_alias or with mod_rewrite

  70. I believe you addressed only 301s and Canonicals on the test DC? Looks very good and a thunbs-up from here.

    Great Information Matt!

  71. …Will they once again eventually index this page once the 301 redirect is removed or is it “Permanent?

    It will be re-indexed andd is not permanent.

  72. As far as that DC is concerned, I have several pages with 301’s that look better compared to some of the others.

    Thanks Matt

  73. I’m curious what adverse affects GoDaddy’s redirects have when redirecting to MS’s Office Live Websites. GoDaddy now offers 302s, 301s, and “permanent with masking”, which is said to also be a 301.

    Office Live sets its people up with a default site on their server with a [yourname].[your category].officelive.com/default.aspx domain. Users can then choose to make their own url “primary”, which will then be [your url].com/default.aspx

    So, users have their domains redirected with a “301 with masking” to make sure the correct (and short) domain shows in the address bar, and MSN is adding “/default.aspx” to that (on the homepage, obviously).

    Is this wreaking havoc on rankings or PR (which show as zero, I believe incorrectly) or causing canonical issues? Visitors can get to Office Live sites with or without the “www”, but there’s no access permitted by MS to that at all by the webmaster/owner. Would GoDaddy’s standard 301 (without masking) have the same intended effect here (showing the short domain) and cause less problem for the search engines and/or PR?

    To the same effect, should site owners be listing “[their site].com” or “[their site.com/default.aspx” with sites and directories. Google has cached every page, for example, except for the domain WITHOUT the “/default.aspx”, although it’s always entered simply as “[xyz].com”. Perhaps this is why it’s not getting a PR, etc.??

    Great blog. Thank you. And all input is greatly appreciated.

  74. I am wondering about using a 301 on my blog to take visitors directly to an affiliate product. In the past I have basically duplicated a merchant’s site on one of my pages as a pre-sell and supplied a button to take interested parties to the product site. Since the copy on my pre-sell page is never as good, comprehensive, or as well designed as provided by the selling merchant, I’m thinking that I should just give up being the middle man and let the merchant do the selling. Is this a bad tactic from a seo point of view, or from any other point of view, for that matter?

  75. For more info on how to use a 301 redirect on your site or blog visit: http://techspotting.org/htaccess-301-redirect-pages-or-entire-site/

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