I’ve decided to take the plunge and move my blog to a more traditional .com domain type (rather than the .net that I currently use). I’m going to keep the .net domain for more esoteric things, private development server, etc.
If you’re reading this on the old blog (blog.bradgrier.net), then please jump over to the new one, bookmark it, and check it out to make sure it works as you expect. You can find it at blog.bradgrier.com.
The dot-com is more common, people have a standard ‘expectation ‘of a site or blog when it has a .com address. A .net address seems to have a different ‘expectation’. And I felt the need to try out a new provider.
So, this will mean a bit of change:
- RSS feeds - already moved my feedburner redirects so there should be no disruption
- Incoming links - not sure what to do about this yet. Incoming links add value to your Google ranking, so this transition will cost me some of that precious Google Juice
- Site duplication - some of the articles I’ve been reading about moving domains suggest maintaining duplicate sites for a few months. I’m thinking about this. It may work, but I’d customize the content so that some sort of ‘domain moved’ message is appended to the feeds etc
But, I’m not the expert here, just the guy doing the work. Do you have any thoughts or opinions about moving domains? What should I watch out for? What should I do differently?
Technorati Tags: Changing Domains, .net, .com, domain, domain name, moving
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{ 2 comments }
Hi, Brad.
One thing you’ll want to do is set up 301 redirects for all of the existing pages on yoursite. The 301 redirect will tell search engines that your content has permanently moved to a new home. This will enable you to maintain the link-love gained from other sites as well as keeping the age of your pages intact.
Looks like you’re using Apache for the web server so this is pretty easy. You just add a few simple lines to the .htaccess file in you root web content directory (Google htaccess 301 redirect for an example).
As an alternative, you could also install the Redirection plugin for WordPress. This will allow you to set up redirects right inside WordPress admin. However, it means you also need to leave WordPress on the old site…
The htaccess redirect is probably the best option, especially if you are moving the whole site complete and leaving nothing behind.
Hi Jamie, thanks for the thoughtful suggestions!
I was thinking 301s would work, but hadn’t started exploring them yet, nor had any idea on how to implement them. The htaccess advice is helpful, and likely the way I’ll go.
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