A recent WSJ article with the ominous title “How Search-Engine Rules Cause Sites to Go Missing” has spurred some interesting conversation among search marketing industry thought leaders. Here’s a snippet of the article from the WSJ:
Mr. Skrenta intends to switch his site over to the more popular .com Web address from .net soon to help eliminate confusion and increase credibility with consumers.
Such a simple change, Mr. Skrenta has discovered, could have disastrous short-term results. About 50% of visits to his news site come through a search engine — and about 90% of the time, that is Google. Some companies say their sites have disappeared from top search results for weeks or months after making address switches, due to quirky rules Google and other search engines have adopted. (Full article)
Danny Sullivan, like most professional Search Marketers, sees this language as somewhat alarmist considering that Google (et al) has a simple solution for pointing search engines from your old server to your new server: The trusty 301 redirect. From Danny:
Maybe SEO isn’t rocket science, but the wrong SEO decision (say knowing the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect) could be costly. That’s illustrated in a Wall Street Journal article today on news search engine Topix and SEO issues in general. A look at that, revisiting Google’s webmaster support efforts plus new confirmation that SEO continues to be more mainstream. (Full Article)
I asked a couple of our Catalyst SEO gurus to weigh in on this topic. Here’s what they had to say.
The Topix.net experience is a good illustration of the need for continuing guidance from a search vendor. Most companies recognize the initial “boost value” of a search engine marketing campaign, but this example points out the need for on-going consultation, because a lot of business decisions can lead to changes that take your website off the map.
-Sherwood Stranieri, Director Search Marketing
All [Topix] needs to do is 301 the dot net over to the dot com and that will solve the problem. We counsel our clients on this issue, especially when they have multiple domains. The [WSJ] article is correct, in that, if you change your domain name on a site that is ranking well, you will almost certainly lose traffic if you don’t redirect the old URL over to the new URL. Search engines see the new domain as a new site so they treat it as such. Pages can continue to show up in SERP’s for months even if a site is shut down completely. So, if you don’t redirect old links over to the new corresponding pages while they still rank, then you’ll lose all that traffic and the associated links and link credit for all the backlinks to the old domain.
That said, the 301 redirect solves it all. It lets Google know that your old domain is now at the new domain, and that all those old backlinks are now for your new site. If Topix decides to run 2 similar sites under different URL’s they run the risk of having both sites penalized or banned from the index.
-Francis Skipper, Director Technology
This is a prime example how search continues to be misunderstood and misrepresented. Have an opinion about this issue? Let us know in the comments.
