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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!