Affect on Page Rank
Recently for Quest Software, we changed the domain name of one of the communities. It was a fairly new community that had plans to become one of the most prolific communities for Quest Software. Prior to the name change, the site already had the Google Page Rank of 3/10 showing up in the Google Toolbar. Not long thereafter, the new URL was showing up with a Page Rank of 0/10. I was quite ashamed as I was the one who recommended the change to the shorter URL. I felt that I had damaged the site. Then someone from outside of the communities pointed out that my redirects where not 301 redirects, they were 302 redirects.

Frankly, at this time, I had never heard of a 301 redirect. But being open to learn new things, I researched the 301 redirects and found this post by Matt Cutts, http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/.

In a nutshell, a 301 redirect is a permenant redirect. A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect. The new domain name recieved a 302 redirect from the original domain name and hence a penalty in Google probably for being duplicate content of an existing domain. The original domain name was simply being considered as temporarily offline.

So I dug in and figured out that the redirects I had set up in IIS did not have the “a permanent redirection for this resource” box checked. Problem solved? At least now I have the redirect set up properly.

Here is an example of what a 301 redirect looks like in IIS.

Here are a couple of examples of doing 301 redirects when using Apache / Linux.
http://trisummit.net/2008/07/01/using-htaccess-to-redirect-a-single-webpage/
http://trisummit.net/2008/05/30/how-to-redirect-a-website-to-remove-the-www/

It still took another 6 weeks or so for the page rank in the toolbar to change. It remained showing up in the toolbar with a ranking of 0/10 throughout this time. Then finally on July 31, it changed to a ranking of 4/10.

Affect on Search Engine Results
While I do not have clear knowledge of how the Quest site was affected in the search engine results, I do have a second example where I do know how it was affected.

My tire chain website had a name which I chose to get rid of. Originally, this obsolete website was the catalog for my new site. I was reluctant to ditch the orginal name at first for one reason–the placement on the long tail search results for “Rud tire chains” was good. While the results for “Tire Chains” was horrible on the original domain name being on page 35, the results for “Rud tire chains” was perfect in the number 2 spot on page 1–right behind the manufacturer’s web page. Now the new domain name showed up on page 15 for “Tire chains” – much better. However, it as in position 5 on page 1 for “Rud tire chains”. I did not want to lose that number 2 spot which the original domain name had. Also, I had already changed about as many of the links as I was going to get changed to the new domain name and I believe that mostly all of the link changes were already saturated in Google for about a two week time period.

I took a chance to see what would happen if I put up a 301 redirect from the old domain name to the catalog directory of the new domain name and placed all of the contents of the old site into the catalog directory of the new site.

There was no change in Google for about ten days. Then finally the 301 redirect kicked in with Google. The old domain name disappeared as I had expected. Then new domain name jumped up into the coveted number two spot that I was afraid to lose. I even jumped up two pages on Google for the keyword search of “Tire Chains” to where I am now on page 13. This was a total win for me. Now I have the domain name I like, the positive ranking of the old domain name, and improved ranking of the new domain name.

Conclusion
A 301 redirect is a critical piece that all SEO experts must be familiar with. Google appears to handle it very nicely. I have been warned in other blog posts that the other search engines may not be so friendly to the 301 redirect. Since the vast majority of my traffic comes from Google anyways, I am not all that concerned with it.