Several weeks ago we forwarded 3 new domains to our main domain (http://www.hookahhub.com) all using “Search Engine Safe†301 redirects. Within days of adding the 301 redirects dozens of our main keywords completely disappeared from the Google results. We made every adjustment we could think of with little or no affect. Then strangely for a couple weeks Google would occasionally add a new keyword or re-index an old keyword for 24-48 hours and then this keyword would totally disappear. This obviously had a dramatic affect on our traffic and sales volume and we therefore invested countless hours investigating the problem. After posting on several forums, it was suggested that perhaps Google had changed its rule on 301 redirects. We were willing to try anything so we immediately removed all of the domains and the corresponding 301 redirects. Wow what a remarkable difference that made! Within 48 hours 20+ keywords were re-indexed and ranking well in the Google results. This number has since grown and remained consistent. In fact many of our main keywords have regained their previous ranking. It may be concluded from these dramatic results that the previously "Search Engine Safe" 301 redirect may not be safe anymore.
yea... i know 301 is the proclaimed as a search engine friendly strategy... but i dont like the idea of redirecting bots to another site. i try to do everything as natural as possible. plus why would you want to do a 301 redirect.. every domain name i have i want original content on that domain. if i were to create a new version of my site on a different domain i would create new content for my new site and not try moving content and all that.. if you think about it too... all the bl's you have built up recognize XYZ.com domain but not ZYX.com so when you do a 301 ... yea the bots will go to your new domain... but i doubt pagerank will follow.. i havent tried nor do i want to.. i dont do 301's period. hey i love hooooookah i just bought one the other day!! mixin all my flavors lol
you could not allow robots to index your 3 domains(disallow everything in robots.txt) and do 301 just to get the type-in traffic from those