It’s not just SEOs anymore who understand the possible consequences of making a “webmastering” mistake these days. In the case of a 301 redirect, the results could be substantial. The Wall Street Journal had an interesting story about Topix planned on changing their domain from a .net to a .com address, but were deathly afraid of any negative consequences. This is a common theme, it seems, for almost anyone attempting to operate a business online.

Such a simple change, Mr. Skrenta has discovered, could have disastrous short-term results. About 50% of visits to his news site come through a search engine — and about 90% of the time, that is Google. Some companies say their sites have disappeared from top search results for weeks or months after making address switches, due to quirky rules Google and other search engines have adopted. So the same user who typed “Anna Nicole Smith news” into Google last week and saw Topix.net as a top result might not see it at all after the change to Topix.com.

Mr. Skrenta has every reason to be concerned. Even small changes I’ve made to websites have occasionally resulted in extremely unstable movements in Google. And all of these shifts end up with revenue in the gutter. This is simply a fact of life on today’s modern Google-centric web.