August 5th, 2006
Changing Your Blog’s Domain Name: Oh, The Pain!
I’m sure some of you have noticed that there has been an interesting blog domain name change in the past week or so. Yes, it was Dell’s decision to change its corporate blog’s name from one2one to Direct2Dell - with a corresponding shift in domain name.
Oh, The Pain!
WTF? Any individual blogger would have thought twice before doing something like this. You would have lost all the search engine optimization (SEO) you’ve done on the original domain. Bye bye to your unsolicited backlinks, Google PageRank and indexed pages. But more importantly, your so-called Google “trust knob” gets reset when you transfer to a brand new domain (since the age of your domain seems to count).
The Worst Part
The worst part of Dell’s act? Their initial decision to use one2one was flawed by a mile, and screams of corporate arrogance. You see, they finally gave up and packed their bags to Direct2Dell because one2one also happens to be the name of a porn site. And Dell’s bloggers admitted to have known this fact before launching with their initial name.
Their reasoning for forging on with one2one: They presumed customers who arrived at the porn site would know it wasn’t Dell the World No.1 PC maker. They presumed their SEO skills would propell their blog up the search engine result pages (SERPs). And I’m not the one who said this. They did.
Thank the Stars that…
Dell finally realised their mistake (relatively) early and moved to rectify it. Admittedly, shifting domains is a small issue for mega-companies like Dell. With word of mouth and key links from Dell’s various websites all over the world being the main source of traffic for their blog, a temporary setback in SEO is nothing. Moreover…
They Followed the Domain Changing Handbook
They redirected traffic from their old domain to the new one. They made sure that feeds were transparently redirected as well. They also made a big announcement on the blog, with the rationale for the change printed clearly.
From there, however, the steps they took are controversial. While many support using permanent redirects (301) from the start to tell the search engines that your old domain is no longer used, some advocate using temporary redirects (302) first and transitioning to a 301 redirect only after you’ve done some link building for your new domain. Dell chose the former, while others prefer the latter.
Personally, I prefer using 301 redirects from the start, though I’ve experimented with a variety of other styles - including leaving both the old domain and new domain up, without using redirects. Of course, it would be even better if you never had to do something like this at all. So, choose your blog’s domain name wisely, and try to follow some of the tips Darren Rowse has pointed out in the process. * Understand, however, that what works for most might not always work for you as well. Don’t be afraid to try different things (even stuff that pro-bloggers abhorr such as the use of subdomains), as long as you don’t regret it and have to do a domain change later.
Edit: A couple of good Redirection plugins for WordPress were featured here last month.
Edit 2 (*): A qualifier was added to the last statement in view of the comment below.
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21 Comments
August 5th, 2006 at 11:04 am
I find it ironic that you yourself have not followed the tips you’ve linked to, and thus, might have to do a domain name switch for this blog in the future.
August 5th, 2006 at 11:19 am
I’ll assume you are referring to the use of a subdomain on this blog for the purposes of this conversation, and really, there’s no need at all to use an anonymous username since I really expected being shot with such a question.
It’s my fault really that I wasn’t clear enough when writing the above piece. I believe it’s my final statement that has you riled up:
Let me start by saying that I believe I broke only one “rule”, which is to not use a top level domain. But that’s not the point. What is the point is that I advised people to make sure that “they would never have to do something like this (a domain name change)”.
It depends on how you interpret this statement, but my intention was to advise others not to ever have, i.e. must, to change. As it stands, I don’t have to change to a full fledged domain name for blogHelper. As I said early in the post, small and independent bloggers like myself think twice before making such a change, even if we wanted to. And I don’t really want to. After all, in the end, whether you use a subdomain or domain is really a personal choice. It doesn’t really hurt that much even if the rationale for your initial choice ends up wrong - as long as you didn’t choose to tie yourself to a hosted service like Blogspot.
All this means is that I have my own reasons for this decision (including the SEO losses that would have to be incurred, of course), but unlike Dell, I didn’t make a mistake that must be rectified. I don’t regret this decision (at least, not yet).
So, all I really suggested was to make sure you choose a domain name that won’t force you to do a change in the future (it’s not only PR issues that could force a change, but also your own regrets) so that you won’t create an unnecessary, yet must-solve problem - and in the process of choosing that domain name, to follow Darren Rowse’s tips. Admittedly, I should have added a qualifier to my last statement - which I’ll do now.
Thanks for bringing the issue up.
August 6th, 2006 at 12:19 am
[…] Weighing in on the side of DOH! however is a couple of people who have a lot more to say on the subject, BusinessBlogWire and Bloghelper. […]
August 6th, 2006 at 10:12 am
I moved from Blogspot to Wordpress a few months back. It was a controlled risk, but I am happy to have my own domain, web hosting and total blog control.
August 6th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
I think in your case, the primary issue at hand was slightly different compared to what I’m trying to address, i.e. being tied to the blogging platform rather than the domain - though it’s clear you had to face the same, if not greater, problems compared to those just changing domain names.
Thanks for sharing.
August 7th, 2006 at 6:39 am
Good thoughts here, all. I recently posted about Dell’s blog name and URL change and was impressed that a simple pre-launch Google search for “one2one” might have saved Dell a lot of trouble and shame.
August 7th, 2006 at 7:27 am
According to their blog post, it seemed they did do such a search. They marched on nevertheless, and gave rather unsatisfactory reasons for doing so - as explained in my post.
October 5th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Domain names are more important for SEO than ever today (October 05, 2006). The reason is that search engines have had to discount more and more on-page factors due to webmasters and their SEO efforts to get top ranking.
With less factors to rank webpages with, search engines are looking for other things to base a website rank in their search results. In-bound links were what made Google what it is today, but even they are discounted now due to webmasters linking to everything they can find to increase their PageRank. But that is another story.
Domain names are the one on-page factor that is hard to cheat on. After all, how many top level domains can a site have?
MSN understands this and ranks a website with a keyword phrase within the domain name well ahead of other sites. For example, I registered a domain name (american-pitbulls.us) for a pitbull site and setup a blog about six months ago. Three months later I did a search on MSN for ‘american pitbulls’ and my blog came up #1! (Page 1 of 70,571 results)
Keep these factors in mind… The site had:
No PageRank
A new domain name, 3 months old then
No links
No SEO - a WordPress Blog
The blog is still at #1 on MSN today ahead of all 70k sites. Feel free to check yourself, AdSense…
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=american+pitbulls&FORM=MSNH
The full url is http://american-pitbulls.us/wp
I’m getting traffic from Google as well now. Anyway, you can see how important the domain name is in ranking well in MSN. Even at third in the search engine wars, MSN can push out a lot of traffic.
Robert McCulloch
http://attorneycollect.com/
February 9th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
You could also get in touch with their Customer Support Department by phone and ask for this issue to be escalated to the appropriate department.
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May 6th, 2007 at 6:42 am
[…] Changing Your Blog s Domain Name: Oh, The Pain! | blogHelperThe Book View is where posts are arranged in book structure, i.e. Table of Contents-style. They are ordered according to logical progression. This is where blogHelper’s best entries - decided by me […]
May 6th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
[…] Changing Your Blog s Domain Name: Oh, The Pain! | blogHelperThe Book View is where posts are arranged in book structure, i.e. Table of Contents-style. They are ordered according to logical progression. This is where blogHelper’s best entries - decided by me […]
May 12th, 2007 at 7:04 am
[…] Changing Your Blog s Domain Name: Oh, The Pain! | blogHelperThe Book View is where posts are arranged in book structure, i.e. Table of Contents-style. They are ordered according to logical progression. This is where blogHelper’s best entries - decided by me […]
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