What Helped a Year Ago Could Kill You Today
As I learn more about what other SEO firms and SEO professionals are doing for their clients I am very often shocked at the techniques they are using. People still stuff the keyword meta tag, place big blocks of text off the side of a page, and point two or more domains at the same site. More often they do very little or nothing and try to hide the fact from the client, and in some cases the client is lucky if this is what's happening because an active SEO professional using outdated techniques might be worse than no SEO at all.
One example is redirects. When you migrate your website to a new domain name--that is, your old website was redcars.com but you're going to copy all your content and files over to bluecars.com and use that domain instead--you're going to lose all your rankings in Google unless you tell them where they can find your new website. You can do this using a redirect which will redirect visitors to your old domain to your new domain.
There are two kinds of redirects. A "302 redirect" is a temporary redirect, while a "301 redirect" is permanent. Without going into technical detail about each one, there were SEO professionals recommending as recently as a year ago that the 302 redirect would do the best job preserving your site's rankings in Google. The idea was that the temporary redirect would preserve the rankings of your old site until the new one got indexed, while the 301 would cause your rankings to immediately drop until the new site was indexed. See "Want To Switch to a New Domain? 301 Redirects vs. 302 Redirects" for more detail.
However, it appears that 302 redirects are not recommended by Google and your site may suffer a worse fate in the rankings by using a 302 rather than a 301. For the record, at MWI we recently rebuilt our own website and we used 301 redirects to take care of redirecting traffic from old urls to the new ones, since we had changed the entire file structure and the 301 redirects worked quite well, preserving our rankings almost perfectly. Apparently 302 redirects may have worked well in the past but the 301 is preferred by Google today.
But the point here isn't so much about whether 302s or 301s are better, the point is that if an SEO professional doesn't stay up on the trends then what worked well a few months ago might do damage today. I don't know why anyone who purports to be an SEO expert would not stay up on these things. It's not that hard to subscribe to a few blogs and keep up. But apparently many of these so-called experts think they learned everything they need to know five years ago and don't realize that SEO is an ongoing service in part because things like this keep changing. Even a year can make a big difference.
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No kidding! Our company is a fledgeling Organic SEO company that we started basically because we realized amidst the optimization of our own website how many crooks and awefully over priced internet ad campaigns a small business can get hooked into. I hate naming names, so I won't, but good lord there are so many SEO companies out there that charge Fortune 500 company rates for Exxon Mobile type results when it comes to actual page ranking effect. I think my favorite catch phrase that I've seen is the "We will get your keyword to the 1st page of every search engine in 1-7 business days!" Unless Google has changed their policies recently about the time between webpage crawls (even for resubmitted sitemaps), I can't see this one being plausable, even under the best circumstances!
Posted by: Jon at May 5, 2008 06:37 PM
