After paying $1 million to purchase the rights to the Topix.com domain, Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta now has to deal with a couple of daily realities in the search world: changing domains could cause a dropoff in search engine-driven traffic, and Google isn’t exactly Nordstrom or L.L. Bean when it comes to customer service.

Andy Hagans recently posted about his linkbait marathon strategy to rank his sites at the top of the search results. Brian Provost posted about his love for domaining. Domain names may play a big roll not only in anchor text, but also in overall domain credibility, linkability, and defensibility.

A thread over in the Google Webmaster Groups talks about the Google Sandbox, and about 301 redirects. In this thread, Adam Lasnik jumps in and sets some expectations on the handling of 301 redirects, and also does some myth breaking. Here is what Adam has to say:

Search Engine Roundtable reports that 301 Redirects Pass Google PageRank & Signals in a "Couple Weeks". SEOs and Webmasters have always queried about the time taken for a site to pass along a PageRank value from one URL to another via a 301 redirect.

A PubCon session entered a place beyond indexing and search traffic: The Duplicate Content Zone, where websites sometimes go and are never seen again. WebProNews tagged along as the session hosts played the Rod Serling role for the audience.

Last weekend, when I moved my blog to this new domain, after moving the files from their old location at http://www.infohatter.com/blog/ to their present location, I needed to set up a redirect to ensure that traffic following links pointing to the old location would still end up at the right posts.

To further elaborate on a article I wrote: 301 Redirects And Domains With And Without WWW, I wanted to discuss the actual implementation of a 301 redirect on IIS.

Man am I sick of this issue. I personally think every website should have a 301 redirect (or something similar in effect) set up so that either the domain with or without the www is the primary. Why? I will tell you!

It’s a fact, Page Not Found, known as a 404 error, can harm your website Ranking with Search Engines as well as being a Turn-Off for Visitors.

One of the more popular questions asked on SEO-related forums as do with the use of 301 redirects and duplicate content. When people pose questions about duplicate content because of domain naming reasons, one of the first things suggested is using a 301 redirect to avoid being penalized.

There are multiple reasons to redirect URLs. For one, your web pages may have moved but their old URLs may still live in users’ bookmarks or in search engine indexes. Without implementing some sort or redirection, that traffic would be lost to a 404 Error Page.

A common area of misunderstanding and confusion within search optimization has to do with how and when one should use a redirection document. If you’ve moved a site to a new domain and you want your normal traffic to follow, a 301 permanent redirect needs to be employed. However, there are other occasions, also involving domain-based issues, when 301′s should be utilized.

Barry Schwarz of SEORoundTable (and now moderator of the SearchEngineWatch forums – congrats!) brought to my attention the troubles webmasters have had with 301 redirects in Yahoo. Yahoo SiteMatch reps even recommended creating doorway pages rather than using 301 redirects, and I’ve read that they will treat 301s as duplicate content.

While traditional marketing can work for the book author or publisher, the return is dim for the huge effort it takes. You must pitch relentlessly and constantly to even get a milligram of attention. While you may have a success or two, most of your efforts will bring poor book sales. Ask yourself right now, what is working for me? What is not?