UPDATE:
The new location of Bush’s bio is now showing up #1 for these terms. There was about a two-day lag for Google to figure out that the page had moved, but it seems – even without using a 301 or 302 redirect – that the Big G was able to figure out what was going on.
George W. Bush’s Bio page no longer shows up as the first listing on Google when searching for the terms “failure” or “miserable failure”. This has long been used as an example of the power of link anchor text. But the Bush administration has finally managed to escape this publicity nightmare.
HOW THEY DID IT:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html
Now redirects (not a “real” redirect because it returns a 200 OK status code) to:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/
(which actually shows the file located here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/index.html)
Where a proper 301 or 302 redirect may have carried over the rankings to the new page, their method does not. So, by redirecting the page they have stripped it clean off the listings.
In this case, they obviously didn’t want their rankings to continue, so a “properly” implemented redirect was probably avoided on purpose. This is a good lesson, however: If you want to move a page to another URL and keep your high rankings, be sure the http header info returns the proper redirect code. More about that here: http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp .
By the way, presumably this move is only temporary. After all, once he is no longer our President, someone else will have the new URL. Will George W. go back to his old URL, or will they move it to a new page? We’ll see in a couple of years…
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