S.e.A.rCh

Has Matt Cutts 302 Hijacked Himself?

Last week I pointed out what I thought was now a pretty irrelevant SERP.  I mean sure, it was pretty big news within the SEO industry, but for normal folk looking for “caffeine” related information I’d say it was given too much real estate within the SERP what with the Sandbox, Google Webmaster Central Blog, and Matt Cutts’ blog ranking 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively.

I’d say that the fact that these websites are ranking so well, so quickly, for such a competitive term, had to be QDF related, so I decided to keep an eye on this SERP to see what happened as the  freshness lapsed.  Today, the same SERP looks as follows:

Notice any differences?  That’s right, Matt Cutts’ blog no longer ranks.  Initially I thought that perhaps this was QDF related – i.e. his blog had had the initial boost, and no longer deserved to be there.  But then why did the Google Webmaster Central Blog remain in the SERP?

If you extend your SERP to show 100 results, you’ll see that the page that now ranks from Matt’s domain is feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/LBCVLkK2JWA/, appearing at 31st.  Click on that link, and you’ll be 302 redirected to the actual post on www.mattcutts.com/blog/caffeine-update/.

So what’s going on here?  It looks like 302 hijacks are making a bit of a comeback.  Basically, some webmasters have linked to the feed URL rather than Matt’s actual blog post (about 85 according to Yahoo), and because of the method of redirect used (302 rather than 301), Google have indexed Matt’s blog content under the feed URL.  Google is clearly having difficulty choosing which version of the content to rank, and in my opinion, has chosen incorrectly.  Matt’s actual blog post has so far attracted 798 links according to Yahoo, so it would make more sense to rank this content.

The problem appears to be much worse than this lone incident though.  A site search of feeds.mattcutts.com shows that 147 pages from Matt Cutt’s blog are ranking under the feeds subdomain.  If you take the first example from that SERP (at least the one I’m seeing), and do a quoted search for a unique snippet (“I’ve never been to Seattle before. Here are some of the things I’ve found myself thinking”), then again, feeds.mattcutts.com ranks rather than the blog post on mattcutts.com:

So what, you might ask? Well, if Matt’s visibility in the caffeine SERP is anything to go by, then the content indexed under the feeds subdomain isn’t performing as well as his own website, and therefore his traffic will be taking a hit.  Having this feeds URL appearing within the SERPs might also be bad for branding, and could encourage people to continue to link to this URL rather than his actual blog post. It’s also interesting because if this can happen to Matt Cutts, it could certainly happen to everyone else out there, and, if 302 hijacks are making a resurgence, then this is something that as SEOs, we’ll need to keep our eyes open for.

Tags: 302 hijack, matt cutts, page hijack, spam