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Matt Cutts decided to get experimental on us this weekend and he moved his blog from MattCutts.com to Dullest.com. To keep visitors going where they should be, Matt utilized 302-redirects in an .htaccess file on MattCutts.com.

In the comments on his “Switching Things Around” post Matt mentioned that Google had already indexed “double digits’” worth of pages from Dullest.com.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what Google had found (and where it found and placed stuff) the next day (today).

So I just made five screen captures and find I cannot upload them. I’ll have to come back and load them later in an update to this post.

I found around 40-50 pages from Dullest.com in Google’s Main Web search.

I found absolutely no pages from Dullest.com in Google’s Blogsearch.

I found that Matt’s “Switching Things Around” post appeared on page 3 of a site search for Dullest.com.

I found that Matt’s Disclaimer ranked second in the site search for Dullest.com.

I found that Matt’s own post does not appear in Google’s Main Web Search results’ first page for the query “‘matt cutts’ ’switching things around’”.

We can ask a number of questions:

1. Does Google Blogsearch follow 302-redirects?
2. Does Google Main Web Search assign any sort of PageRank for 302-redirects?
3. If people are linking to the new post on Dullest.com, what will that do for Matt’s rankings in Google?

I could probably ask other questions but these are good enough. There is only one definitive answer, I think, that we can point to right now. In the past Matt has said that Google won’t transfer PageRank through 302-redirects. Although this is a pretty short timeframe, I’d say his test indicates that Dullest.com has no PageRank despite the fact that his post attracted a lot of attention (perhaps only from automated sites — maybe this was a test to see how many SEO spammers would fall into a simple trap). So Matt has demonstrated that, in the short-term at least, a high PR site won’t transfer its PageRank (immediately) through 302-redirects.

Blogsearch, of course, seems to take its sweet time about indexing content these days but maybe they filter out all the scraper sites and therefore haven’t found any links to Dullest.com yet. Or did someone go in and tweak the Blogsearch index (with or without Matt’s knowledge)?

If Matt leaves Dullest.com live for a few weeks it will be interesting to see what happens to his search rankings. After all, people will link to his blog posts and the site will accrue PageRank on its own, thus giving it some juice to get into Google’s Main Web Search results. Will it compete with MattCutts.com for queries like “matt cutts blog”?

BTW — if any Googlers working on Chrome are reading this post, I have two issues to point out (sorry — I’m too busy to look up where to send feedback today).

• Chrome was unable to use the image upload form in this version of Wordpress. I had to switch to Internet Explorer to attempt the upload (only to learn that my account doesn’t have permission or something to upload images).
• I bought a new home computer a few weeks ago and installed Chrome on it. Now when I load Chrome it shows me my popular site icons on the first tab. However, on this computer here at work, I still have to open second tab to see those icons.

Both computers use Windows Vista (Professional at work, Home at home). I don’t know if that matters. I tried to trigger a Chrome update on the work computer but it said it was up-to-date.

Anyway, I LIKE seeing those icons on the first tab. Don’t show me an empty screen when I load Chrome — show me my favorite sites!

ON EDIT: You can control this in Google Chrome by setting the option “Use New Tab Page” for opening the browser. Duh!

There is an overextended discussion slowly pacing its way through the SEO community regarding “overoptimization”, and in some corners people refine that discussion to internal navigation, although we could easily argue about what constitutes “internal navigation” (okay, I could easily argue about what constitutes “internal navigation”).

This is one of those SEO myths that seeks to explain phenomena without enough data to show that the explanation is credible. For example, near as I can determine, I use every page on every site I create to link home with targeted anchor text (most of the time, the keywords are brand-valued). I’ve never seen anything like an “over optimization” penalty for any of these sites.

But I strive to get my visitors to the right place as quickly as possible. Visitors tend to be disoriented when they land on random pages. They have braced for impact but the impact is still jarring.

That is, when you’re dealing with long-tail search referrals people usually know they are clicking through to a deep page that may or may not be what they are looking for. Visitors often guess that the search engine is putting them close to the right page if it cannot find the right page.

That places the burden of guiding the visitor on you, the SEO, because you’re optimizing that visitor’s search experience from the time they pick a link to click on until they take whatever action is regarded as a conversion (informational, transformational, or transactional).

Disoriented visitors look for something specific when they first click through to a page: confirmation that they are on the right path. If the page is what they want, great. If it’s not what they want, it needs to lead to what they want, and the shorter the path the better.

Conventional wisdom teaches us that visitors look for the home page to reorient themselves. In effect, they are adding a page between themselves and their destination because they are going through a mental reset. They are getting their bearings.

One way to reduce this extra page stressing on visitor paths is to provide more information on each page than you would normally expect to find — but the additional information needs to be packaged and flagged in such a way that people will see it and know it for what it is.

That information usually consists of text links or advertisements (usually graphical ads). The text links are the secondary navigation that is relevant to the page’s local neighborhood (its “section” on the site) OR they are cross-promotional links. Depending on your site design you may be able to provide both sets of links on a page without confusing visitors.

The advertisements are calls to action (well, they should be). If you have a 500-page site that sells an eBook, every page should have that invaluable “CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD NOW!” graphic. Don’t fuss over whether this is part of the site’s navigation. Most visitors will look for your home page before they scan your navigation to find that embedded “Downloads” link.

Using on-page ads and secondary nav menus or cross-promotional links to attract the visitor’s attention to what they probably want to find cuts down their travel time to the destination. It helps improve their search experience.

Search optimization is not just about getting people to visit a page. It also includes what happens after they click through. When you’re trawling for long-tail traffic you need to make sure you’re not dragging out the discovery process by forcing people to bounce all over your site, looking for what they really want.

We occasionally receive low-ball purchase offers from domain hunters whose emails smell suspiciously like link building emails. That is, these low-ball offers seem to be undervaluing domains because the people behind them are hoping to make a quick, easy profit.

By now many people have a growing catalog of domain names they don’t quite know what to do with, or just don’t have the time to develop into something useful. I have some 4-letter domain names, for example, that were not bought up in the rush to own 4-letter domains back when that was the “hot” thing.

Domain prospectors now seem to be looking at brand value more than length. If a domain can be associated with a company, a product, a service, or a person there is probably someone out there who would want to buy it.

A handful of people have built huge fortunes by investing in domain names. They place ads on the domains and wait for the brand-value to attract buyers who want to develop real Web properties. A 2-letter domain name might command a price of $250,000.

The SEO community has only driven up the price of old, unused domains by investing in the “aged domain” mythology, which teaches us that all we have to do is buy an old domain and 301-redirect it to get all its “link juice”. Many an SEO has learned much to his dismay that it’s not quite that simple.

For example, if you’re trying to build your search results on the basis of PageRank rather than anchor text you’re exchanging low efficiency for really low efficiency. PageRank should be the least of a link builder’s concerns.

Some SEOs buy domains that have been penalized or banned and they end up with real lemons. There is a sordid, underhanded side to domain trading that is rarely discussed in public. Think about it. Someone out there has a domain that has accrued a lot of links, it earns tons of traffic, and the name is easy to type in.

Why should you be able to buy that domain for only a few thousand dollars? There’s something wrong. Either you’re buying from someone who doesn’t appreciate the value of his domain or he burned it and is dropping a dying property before all the site and link queries dump his pages.

If you’re going to buy a domain that has been used before, you should be ready to write a reinclusion request. You should be ready to put some real content on it. And you should be ready to build links for it.

In other words, don’t assume your “aged domain” comes with any value. The odds of that value you perceive vanishing overnight are pretty high.

You can age the domain yourself (I do this), starting the clock over as soon as you put content on the domain and point some links at it. Just get a few links every month. Add some new content every month or two.

Create a pipeline of domains you’re cultivating for relevance, value, and linking resources. A lot of SEOs who “trade” three-way links sort of do this, only they don’t really invest in their linking resources. They just create crappy sites that look like they are not parked and then start dumping links on them.

If you do this right you’ll end up with a couple hundred domains that have content, receive traffic, and all have some link power that you can leverage for your own benefit. Now, if you’re just promoting one Web site this is an extremely inefficient way of doing things. But if you promote a LOT of Web sites, having a large network of aged domains whose backlink profiles you built gives you a tremendous advantage.

You can use old, well-established but abandoned domains if you want to but if you don’t treat them with the respect they deserve you’ll realize less return on your investment than if you had simply bought previously unused domains.

So the bottom line here is: buy old domains that you can develop reasonable plans for, that you can actually use. Buy old domains that you can give new life to. The day may come when someone offers you a few thousand dollars for an old domain and, who knows? Maybe they’ll get what they are paying for.

Google Analytics’ blog just announced this week that Google’s classic search referral string will be changing format. They advise Webmasters who run their own server-side analytics packages to change their query string references from “/search?” to “/url?”.

In fact, if you’re a Webalizer user and you know how to configure Webalizer you should not have to change anything, as the correct query string reference to parse out is “q=”, which is not changing.

I have no idea of what the people at Google Analytics are thinking of — perhaps there are other packages out there which would look for “/search?” and they shall now have to be changed. But this announcement does make me wonder just exactly how well the Google Analytics team understands industry analytics techniques.

I’ve long noticed major discrepancies between Google Analytics data and my own server side search reference data. Google Analytics recognizes far fewer search engines and search engine referrals than server side analytics packages (I have used several through the years, not just Webalizer). I often have to look at site referrals in Google Analytics to see data for other search engines (but I cannot get the keyword data).

In any event, if you are using Webalizer and you have specified “q=” for Google search referral parsing, DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING. Wait and see if Google’s new Javascript interface changes your server-side analytics reporting.

If it does, I doubt implementing “/url?” will fix the problem. You would probably have to install an upgrade for Webalizer (and who knows when it would be fixed?).

Web merchants with affiliate programs have long struggled with the conflict of interest between allowing their affiliates to rank well for brand expressions and competing directly with affiliates. When your affiliate sites outrank you you’re getting Indirect Search Placement. This builds second-tier search visibility for you, which is not as great as being the first-ranked site but at least you get some search visibility.

There are other ways you can build indirect search visibility, including: press releases (you appear in press release site searches and possibly news search); news stories (you appear in news search and may possibly get a favorable listing in Web search); blog articles and interviews (you appear in blog search and may possibly appear in Web search); Web directories (you appear in their search and possibly in search engines’ results).

The major search engines have all built filtering mechanisms into their algorithms to minimize indirect search placement, which has also been incorporated into many people’s search reputation management strategies. Nonetheless, through links and on-page copy and emphasis you can build up a lot of indirect search visibility through secondary sources.

Rather than launch a whole new campaign and initiative to build indirect search visibility, it’s better to optimize your link-building techniques so that they maximize your indirect search placement. Don’t just ask for a link. Build a relationship with a Web site that ensures dedicated copy about you (mentioning your site) establishes its own search visibility. You don’t just get a relevant link — you also get fantastic advertising and marketing reach.

Link building should not be confined to just acquiring links. It should achieve the maximum possible return on investment. You can measure ROI for link building in part by evaluating your indirect search placement.