Redirect 301 - looks like it works!

10 days after I started this experiment I am positive it works, and works even better than I expected. Out of two redirected pages one had very short lived drop of traffic - for a couple of days literally - and it came back to the pre-redirect levels and stays there. From being nowhere for the main keywords page moved to the second page of Google and stays there, even managed for a short while to jump to the first page and make a double listing with the main page.

Another one seemed to have a more prolonged drop of traffic - until I realized there was something else involved. Further investigation showed that this page was also receiving a significant amount of traffic from MSN, from another keyword. And I did remove that keyword from the title at the time of doing redirect, cause this made the title more oriented to the main keyword. Well, right now I restored the old title, will keep a look at this and report later...

Now, what happened earnings wise? Surprisingly, they stayed the same for the second page. This was due to the overall growth of cost of click for the last several days I think. For the first page earnings actually increased like 80%, probably due to the same factor.

In fact, I made the same experiment for the third page at the same time - I did not mention it cause it is using completely different keywords. Yet the results are pretty much the same - over the span of 10 days overall unchanged traffic and almost double earning :)