I’ve heard some rumblings in the search industry lately that perhaps 301 redirects aren’t as powerful as they used to be. From stating that it ‘no longer passes the anchor text PageRank’ to stating ‘it doesn’t work unless it is cross-domain’ to ‘it doesn’t work unless it is within the same domain’.

Well, as usual I take note but don’t get too worked up about it until I check myself. In my opinion, they still work fine at least onsite for similar (as determined by Google) pages.

You may have caught my tweets with @halfdeck over the past couple of days (full, albeit slightly confusing, conversation here) about the notorious ‘Barack Obama’ search that I’ve been obsessed about for months now. Not really for any legitimate reason but more of a ‘am I worth my salt’ obsession.

In summary, there were two separate pages for Barack Obama on Chicago Tribune; one ended with /obama and the other ended with .topic. The /obama page was actually ranking the highest (top of 2nd page) due to high quality links from external domains and the supplemental indent (depending on title tags though it was sometimes it’s own result, that’s another post) was the .topic page (ranked middle of 3rd page). In a perfect world, I would’ve 301 redirected the .topic page to the /obama page. However, it is far from a perfect world and the best I could do was 301 redirect the /obama page to the .topic page. In essence, I was redirecting TO the less powerful page. Again, not ideal but it’s what I could do today–so I did it.

Well, the results are in . . . as of 8pm central time on 2009-04-28, I’ve, barely made it to the first page of Google for the term ‘Barack Obama’. Plus, more amazingly I’m on the second page for ‘Obama’ (the higher volume keyphrase).