ElementsDaily

It’s funny, sometimes I crack open the old blog editor to write a post about a topic and end up writing about something completely different.  That’s what happened today.  While I was researching the use of using permanent redirects I stumbled upon a recent interview with Matt Cutts who happens to be Google’s mouthpiece to the SEO world.  In that interview Matt Cutts says something pretty poignant which pretty much verified what had long been suspected, which was that 301 permanent redirects do not transfer all of their PR(Page Rank) to the new designated page or website.

“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 Page Rank 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).”

Sometimes there is a need to move content from one area of your website to another or you might even need to change your whole domain when you receive a cease & desist order from an attorney.  I myself have even used 301 redirects on my own sites when I went from shtml pages with ssi calls in them to php pages. 

So now that we know that there is at least some loss of PR when using a 301 redirect should we just leave the old page where it is and create new pages in the right place?  Well that’s a thought, but lets look at another point Matt Cutts makes about 301 redirects in that interview.

“Typically, duplicate content is not the largest factor on how many pages will be crawled, but it can be a factor. My overall advice is that it helps enormously if you can fix the site architecture upfront, because then you don’t have to worry as much about duplicate content issues and all the corresponding things that come along with it. You can often use 301 Redirects for duplicate URLs to merge those together into one single URL.”

See this is why mothers should not let their babies grow up to be SEO guys.  If we absolutely need to move content we either end up losing some of our existing PR on a 301 redirect to the new content or we leave the old content in place and risk a duplicate content penalty which Matt Cutts confirms could be a factor in how many pages on our site gets crawled.

What I take away from that interview is that we should not have duplicate content on our pages and we should really 301 redirect pages with content that needs to be moved to their respective new pages at the cost of some of our PR.  I guess that means that we should have bullet proof plans for our website layout prior to launching anything, but as anyone who has been in the traffic generation business can tell you adaptating to new strategies is paramount to maintaining success.

Ok, so I’m not actually a mad scientist bent on ruling the world, but the title of the article intrigued you enough to read this far, right? Well, that was the whole point of the title. If you follow the cool kids in the SEO game then you already know that one of the best ways to increase your rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) is by getting as many offsite links pointing to your website as possible. That increases your perceived popularity which is a major determining factor in your rankings. Those SEO cool kids use linkbait to draw in as many inbound links as possible, but very few of them will tell you exactly what linkbait is and why it is so important to their website’s success.  Most likely they don’t want anymore competition than they already have.

Quite simply, linkbait is content placed on a website that will offers something worth linking to. A few excellent examples of linkbaits are super-nifty flash games like Radioactive Teddy Bear Zombies, something controversial like KFC Sells “Cancer-Linked Food” to Fight Breast Cancer or something inane and humorous like Britney Spears’ Father Mandates Bra on Public Outings…and you thought my title was a bit overboard?  Ok, but each example linkbait web page was built to draw in those precious links, and look at that it worked because I linked to them in this article just now.

But how many of you actually read the full article or played the flash game on the websites in question?  Here’s the thing, it doesn’t really matter.  Those websites could get linked to by their titles alone.  Content may be king, but titles draw links, which lead to more traffic pointing to that indexed content; and as I pointed out, they don’t have to be great titles at all just titillating.

What I’m trying to get at here is that titles are an important form of linkbait because they can bring in links and thereby increase your website’s search engine rankings.  For more information on title creation check out Jeremy LaDuque’s 5 Tips for Effective Titles.

When it comes purchasing domain names, I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues purchase hyphenated domains because the non-hyphenated versions were already taken by someone else. I don’t really think that’s a wise practice because most type-ins (surfers who type in a domain name rather than landing on a website via a search engine) will type in the name without the hyphens. In that case I just recommend spending a little bit of time and getting a bit creative to come up with a unique domain name.

But if you dismiss the type-in traffic, can a hyphenated name really hurt you? Not so according to Bing’s program manager, Brett Yount and Google software engineer Matt Cutts whose blog has become the voice of Google’s best practices for SEO. Both have publicly stated that hyphens in a URL act as keyword separators.