Matt Cutts Divulges yet more

Matt Cutts divulges yet more “Information”, this time about 301’s!

Well, well, well, you could never guess who has appeared back on the scene with yet more information to help indulge us with. That’s right; Mr Cutts (also called many other names, most not repeatable on this Blog) has come back to tell us all that we are doing something wrong….. Again!

According to the Spam specialist at Google’s headquarters there are several problems with using 301 redirects. Basically he has said that the excessive use of 301 redirects will result in the loss of Pagerank on your site. All of this coming from the Search Engine who announced a few months ago that Pagerank would soon be abolished. There was a panic towards the end of last year about how Pagerank would soon be removed from Google’s toolbar to help prevent spamming and redirecting sites. This clearly has not happened and Mr Cutts is back to telling us information that has no merit.

All of us use 301 redirects and in most cases big web-sites use them to absolute excess. All of these sites that use 301’s still rank very high in the SERPS and also retain their Pagerank. What are we going to do with the stuff that Mr Cutts throws at us, most people throw his comments in the trash, but what if what he is saying is a warning?

There is of course the off chance that MC (Matt Cutts) is sending a gentle warning to those that are trying to sculpt Pagerank. His argument is that your website should be built properly in the first place so 301’s would not be necessary (a bit harsh for small business owners). Everyday we find something that we need to change on our sites, or want to edit, and what if a 301 is what we need. The redirects need to be used by travel agents or hotels, if a hotel is no longer on offer you don’t want people turning up at a 404 page, you want to send them to another more relevant one.

Now I don’t know about you but I think Mr Cutts needs to think about this all a little more.

Bio:

Marcus Travels the world but is very much stuck in the Blogging and SEO world, Australian holidays are a great passion of his, along with Travel blogging.

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One Response to “Matt Cutts Divulges yet more”

1. EngineSearchSEO.com says:

   March 31, 2010 at 9:55 am

   You can use up to five 301 redirects and Google claims this is not harmful. But there is no way to know how long Pagerank will take to transfer – and ultimately no guarantee that it ever will. I would not want to gamble a high Pagerank on even one redirect without a very compelling business case for the redirect.