News Source: 1
Published: May 08, 2009 - 06:32 am
Story Found By: Harith 1472 Days ago
Category: SEO
- "I added an .htaccess file that will do 302 redirects from www.mattcutts.com/path/file.html to www.dullest.com/path/file.html".
- "if you were truly moving a site, a 302 redirect wouldn’t be the right redirect to use--a 301 (permanent) redirect would be better."
- "I may move back to mattcutts.com soon, which is why I stuck with 302s."
Personly I think Matt is testing the way Google handle 302 redirect in relation to moving a whole site from one domain to another.
Danny Sullivan has also posted his guess about possible Matt Cutts testing "Dullest.com, huh? Why do I suspect some ultra-secret Google we get 302s right test is going on :-)"
So how well has Google handled Matt Cutts 302 redirect? Not well at all, IMO.
Here are some of the consequences of Matt Cutts 302 redirect:
- Two identical sites both listed on Google serps. Duplicates?
- The two identical sites rank on Google serps for several searches. For
example:
http://tr.im/kyuz
http://tr.im/kyMb
http://tr.im/kzah
http://tr.im/kyQ8
etc... (For your convenience, I’m posting the example within first comment).
Above illustrate very clear that Google hasn’t been able to handle the results of 302 redirect used in moving a domain to a different one properly.
4 Comments
Comments
References:- Matt Cutts post "Switching things around" - Danny Sullivan’s comment.- Two identical sites both listed on Google serps. Duplicates? site:mattcutts.comsite:dullest.com- The two identical sites rank on Google serps for several searches. For example:http://tr.im/kyuz http://tr.im/kyMb http://tr.im/kzah http://tr.im/kyQ8
"I added an .htaccess file that will do 302 redirects from www.mattcutts.com/path/file.html to www.dullest.com/path/file.html". <div></div><div></div><div>Hehe.</div><div></div><div></div><div>This bit caught my eye: ""redirects from www.mattcutts.com/path/file.html"" as it is a very incomplete description of what you actually need to do.</div><div></div><div></div><div>So, did he also cater for non-www URL requests, and/or appended period on hostname, and/or appended port number on hostname, too?</div><div></div><div></div><div>If you don’t cater for *all* of those, you can end up with some very ’interesting’ issues. Ahem.</div>
I think Matt’s just testing something, probably that Google might be smarter in handling 302s than we think -- or that this will change in the near future. He’s too smart to have done this to his blog for no good reason.In particular, this search:http://www.google.com/search?q=matt cuttsbrings up the dullest.com domain but this:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mattcutts.combrings up the mattcutts.com domain, matching the search terms entered. I think Google might be trying to figure out which is the right domain to show depending on a search query, in cases where it sees 302s.Note that in two of your examples, it’s not both dullest.com and mattcutts.com that are showing. it’s dullest.com and FEEDS.mattcutts.com -- that happens to plenty of sites.I suspect he’s also more than happy for people to show how Google is "screwing up" with his domain, so he has plenty of examples to illustrate how a future change to the algorithm might solve those things.
I’m still trying to figure out what he meant by digg torture testing, think it could be related to the digg bar and how it frames content? what happens if the framed content is actually a page that is 302’d?