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Jul
13th

The Ups and Downs of a Domain Move

Posted in SEM by User ImageDouglas Karr at 9:23 am

A week ago I changed the domain of my blog from douglaskarr.com to marketingtechblog.com. The move has been very effective (already) from a Search Engine Optimization standpoint.

Domain Change for Search Engine Optimization works… quickly

Across the board, my site is now ranked #1 for marketing technology or marketing technology blog and moved up to page 3 for marketing blog. That’s the pop I was looking for.

Disadvantages of Domain Change

The enormous disadvantage of a domain change is that, aside from Search Engines, very few third party services will see the domain change and automatically update your site. Technorati required that I write support. They picked up the new domain right away, but their system doesn’t have a means of combining or updating a url because their system is domain name based.

Alexa is updating automatically as my traffic increases for the new domain over the other. The disadvantage of this, of course, is that I took a huge hit on Alexa ranking - which is used by multiple ad services to properly price ads based on traffic. If you really want a steal, you should buy up the AdToll ad in the top right corner right now… the pricing is based on a site with significantly less ranking than mine.

Google Analytics was great, it captured all the stats and allows the user to update the domain on the existing account so the stats are seamlessly applied. GetClicky (an outstanding blog Analytical solution) allows a domain change but it appears I lost stats for the couple days the account wasn’t updated for the new domain.

There are quite a few other services out there that needed updated as well, I’m figuring them out as I go! Ultimately, the move was an outstanding decision. I believe it will result in many more hits from search engines and it will also distance this blog from a personal one to a professional one.

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7 Comments »

Comment by no imageLorraine Ball (SezWho)
2008-07-13 09:47:06

Congrats on your new home.

I moved http://www.Indy-Biz.com several times, from blogger to Lorraineball.com to its current and final home. I think the short term dip in traffic was worth it to get it named correctly.

Did you post any notes to on-line news sources about the change?

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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2008-07-13 09:53:55

Hi Lorraine!

No, I sure didn’t. Did that help you?

Doug

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Comment by no imageJim Brown (SezWho)
2008-07-13 10:13:07

Great job, Doug. Have you done the 301 redirects yet? While you rank #1 for “Marketing Technology” it is still pulling http://www.DouglasKarr.com as the domain you are ranking for.
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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2008-07-13 18:14:53

The old domain is one of those weird things that will work itself out on the SERP. It appears that Google is through about half of my links, I’m sure over time it will be replaced throughout the index.
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Comment by no imageBarry Zweibel, GottaGettaBlog! (SezWho)
2008-07-13 22:22:03

Hi Doug ~ I migrated my blog, too, from http://www.ggci.com/blog/ to http://www.ggci-blog.com, keeping the old on live as an archive. The old on still has better rankings, but the new one’s coming along quite nicely. (The old one was taking too long to update each time.)
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Comment by no imagePatric Welch (SezWho)
2008-07-14 10:34:26

Oh I feel your pain Doug. My Alexa ranking took a huge hit when I switched to noobie.com. It almost feels like starting over although it is climbing back up little by little.

I still find little things here and there that I have to tweak. Just part of the process I guess.

I still stand by my reasoning of do it now while it’s still early. Imagine making the switch 10 years from now.

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Comment by no imageStephen James (SezWho)
2008-09-04 08:02:18

Unlike most of our friends above, I have divided my content into another domain, LlamaAndLamb.com, with the purpose of separating my personal life from my professional life (as much as one can on the web). All of my sites used to be at smjdesign.com except “the poetry knook” I also took my (thousands of) photos site and added them to LlamAndLamb. Both these sites together caused my PageRank to go from 4 to 3 at smjdesign.com immediately. I believe this is because the number of the pages on the site was cut in half–which leads me to wonder. Is it better to have one large site for all your sites/pages?
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