SEO Daily links + Versions + 301 struggle

The new tool of the day for me was Versions. 10-12 years ago I already used an SVN (Subversion), so the concept of “a software versioning and a revision control system” is not foreign to me. But now I was set up with one, I actually used it and it magically worked.
On the other hand I couldn’t accomplish what I set up to do, hence my struggle of the day: I was supposed to redirect every link coming to an old version of a site to the home page of the new one. The site had a functioning .htaccess file so normally I would just add this line to it

RedirectMatch 301 ^/oldsite/ http://www.example.com/

I got that code from this handy and well structured page. But it didn’t work, so I had to troubleshoot. This page says don’t mix RedirectMatch with RewriteRule in the same file. I didn’t find any confirmation for this elsewhere so my troubleshoot marched on. This page suggested to use this code:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/oldsite/(.*[^/])/?$ http://www.example.com/

That didn’t work either. I also tried appending the line with various combination of “[NC,R=301,L]” at no avail. Then I learned that our server is IIS and not Apache, although we have a plugin installed that is comparable to Apache’s mod_alias. Nevertheless RedirectMatch doesn’t seem to be compatible with IIS. I was “this” close to write the 100+ RewriteRule lines that would solve my issue in a rather inelegant way. But I will give another chance to finding the nice solution tomorrow.
And now onto today’s SEO links with my comments in italics:

• Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz’ CEO posted a comparative chart of SEO responsibilities between 1999 and 2003 vs 2004-2008 and another one for 2011.
  I’v been in the business of SEO for 3 whole weeks and ready to absorb lessons learned from the last 12 years. In order to do well my job now, I should understand what experts did in the past and focus on not just the latest fads, but good basic proven rules too.
• Ross Hudgens shared some tips based on CDBaby’s success.
  The creativity of their non-standard “your order has been shipped” letter is not just awe-inspiring, but generated plenty of back links. The cool factor of “Call-to-action” links in emails is lower, but still a good idea to include them.
• Andy Atkins-Krüger reported that the Dutch are the most engaged online, but the Russians are catching up. (On a related note see the launch of today webmaster.yandex.com.)
  I was disappointed not to see Hungary in the stats, and even checked the original Comscore data for them, but they were not present there either. Looks like my old country’s market is either too small or not measurable enough.