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Remember Ms Dewey, Microsoft’s experimental pseudo-interactive search engine interface? The Ms. Dewey actress Janina Gavankar is still entertaining thousands of fans but the old search site ain’t what it used to be. It now redirects to EVB.com, the Web site of the creative agency that helped create Ms. Dewey in the first place.

The lesson to be learned here has nothing to do with search engine optimization — it just has to do with capturing traffic. When you set up a site on behalf of a client, and the client walks away from that site, what do you do with the property? Some people obviously feel it’s okay to 301-redirect the property to their own corporate setting.

Maybe there was an agreement in writing permitting the repurposing of the MsDewey.com domain (one would like to think so). Maybe Microsoft felt it would eventually grab more real estate elsewhere. Hard to say.

Or, we can put it another way, in the form of a question and answer.

Question: When should your SEO plan favor links over content?

Answer: When it will take less time and money to build the links than to rebuild the content.

You don’t have to build the best SEO blog on the Web if you can drive traffic to it by redirecting a once-popular site. People will see your site and decide whether to come back.

What would happen if we 301-redirected SEO Theory to Best SEO Blog or some other Visible Technologies site one day? Would all the thousands of people who visit SEO Theory every month keep coming back, even though the content they were looking for wasn’t there any more?

In search engine optimization you should always focus on the content first, but if a windfall drops in your lap or if you cannot do much with the content, then you need to be creative with your linking. Think of links as the frame that you build around the picture that is your Web site.

A really great frame can make even the worst picture look better — that is the Art of SEO. The difference between a good SEO and an SEO who is just stumbling through the process is that the good SEO recognizes where you’ll get the most bang for your buck. Sometimes that falls under fixing the picture and sometimes that falls under framing the picture.

And when the contract runs out, you may be able to put a new picture inside the frame you built. Some people might point out that replacing the picture in the frame is not the most ethical approach, but it seems to happen more often than most of us realize, and for many different reasons.

Be sure you make informed choices and don’t just choose to do what you think other people would do.