As you can probably see, I have recently changed the domain name for my blog to a shiny new short one – that contains only my name, and actually has a O not a zero, so I will hopefully have a better chance of ranking for my own name now 🙂
Anyway, before i changed domains, a friend of mine suggested we do an experiment to test a theory a top SEO company has about passing keywords to a new domain name by using a 301 redirect.
Also the keyword being passed cannot be mentioned anywhere on the page – the only reference to it was to be in the keyword used to link to my blog.
My friend made a word up, i wont mention it in text it will contain it in the screenshots below (don’t want to screw up the results 🙂 ) and we linked to my blog from a high traffic website, using this made up word as the anchor text.
We waited for the link to be picked up (and in fact had to give it a kick up the arse using Jumptags to speed things up a bit – I wanted my new domain name!!) and once it was ranking in google for this keyword we put the 301 redirect in place to move all pages, posts etc over to 0lly.uk.
Again, we waited….
And waited…
And slowly but surely the UK domain name was being replaced in the index by the .IM domain name, and then one day we checked and;
So there you have it! This has proven on this occasion that in fact a 301 redirect will pass “anchor text only” keywords over to your new domain name.
NB I have noticed a fair drop in traffic and have lost some of my high positions for certain keywords switching to this domain, however I don’t care as the new name kicks ass. 🙂