What I mean by bait and switch is when SEOs take a page that has a good amount of links and redirect the page to a product page, homepage, or wherever so that the new page can rank for the term that the old page did. Now sometimes the new page that the 301 is directed at is relevant to the old page, but sometimes it is not. And it is in this latter instance that Google gets offended.

It was noted that Google worked to eliminate this tactic (the latter in the previous paragraph) by implementing the Googlebomb algorithm a whle back. the idea is that if you 301 a page and the new page is not relevant to the old one, meaning the new page does not contain the keywords from the old on the page, then Google diffuses the passing of the anchor text(s). So the old page will still pass page rank theoretically, but it will no longer pass any keyword anchor text link value.

What does this mean to SEO consultants?

This means that if you want to take full advantage of 301ing pages with links to new pages, make sure that the two pages are relevant and that the new page contains the keywords of the old. It makes sense being that Google wants relevant results. It was too easy to manipulate the SERPs using 301s before. Now at least there is an order of relevancy.

There was a point, number 7, which dealt with the idea that you must hold on to the 301′d domain in order for it to continue to pass authority. This is an important note because as soon as the domain expires you lose all of the authority that it was passing. I knew this, but I was not aware that Google recommends that you keep the domain for at least 180 days after the 301. I will have to agree with Stoney here and say that I suggest you keep it going for life! I believe that most people out there already knew or assumed this idea, but I am also sure that there are people that do not. The 301 redirect is a powerful tool of a professional SEO, but you must know all of the little nuances to take full advantage of it. And you have to do a lot of due diligence in finding and making the purchase of a good domain. I will get into that in our next SEO 301 class.