Tag: search engine optimisation

  • Passing Keywords through 301 Redirects

    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. 🙂

  • Search engine optimisation

    Me and dave have been offering SEO as a service to our customers for well over a year now, and its only really been recently that i have started getting my head round it.

    Its so confusing when you start looking into it, there are so many tools, websites and people that claim to be able to help you do this, and get to the top – the fact of the matter is, you will struggle to get to the top unless your site sells those particular keywords to google.

    So i would struggle to get to the top of google with this site, for say, debt management – because aside from my ramblings about banks screwing me over there aint anything on this site about debt – so no matter how many links i point here with the keyword debt management is irrelevant.

    When we first started the SEO we could of probably been described as black hat, as all we did was buy links from link brokers – AND THAT WAS IT! We soon learnt by our mistakes and slowly but surely we are starting to paint over the black with a nice shade of GREEN.

    I say green as apposed to white, because we are trying to get people to the top of google with minimal inbound links, and just purely based on the relevance of the site and its content. And of course by building the site with all the relevant jigsaw pieces required by the search engines.

    I’d welcome any pointers in regards software to manage my SEO efforts, and also ways to get decent links that are not frowned upon – as i find it very hard to get in touch with people who have the most relevant websites.

    Do you do SEO?

    What do you charge?

    Do you make any guarantees?