How not to do a 301 redirect

A while back, Patrick Gavin announced that he had bought the domainsearchengineoptimization.net and was going to rank it 1st place in Google for search engine optimization within a year.  He picked up a lot of publicity from the fact that he paid $62,500 for the domain.

At the time I made the comment on SEO Book:

The only way you could rank for that term quickly would be to take on tonnes of clients and use footer links in all of their sites, massive nepotistic linking or massive link buying. I don’t see him taking on seo clients, and option 2 & 3 are pretty much ruled out due to the fact he’s making a public spectacle of the attempt to rank.
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The only chance I give him is if he is planning to 301 his personal site to the new one, since it already ranks first page.

It seems he went the route of  the only chance of success I was giving him, by 301′ing PatrickGavin.com to SearchEngineOptimization.net. This of course lead to his original site dropping out of the results completely (it was originally ranking 7th).

Publicly announcing you are going to rank first for that term, then attempting to do it by 301′ing an existing established site into a $60k domain was always filled with danger.  He was setting his stall out for Google to make an example of him, and it looks like they done it as he has been forced to undo the 301 due to a complete lack of rankings.  Now his site simply says

SearchEngineOptimization.net has gone offline. We will be back soon!

Was anyone expecting much Google love to the man publicly announcing his plans with this, given that he built, ran and sold the largest public text link sales network?

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One Response to “How not to do a 301 redirect”

1. Marcus says:

   March 17, 2010 at 3:23 pm

   One word:

   Plonker.