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View Full Version : Changing Domains. Is it a good Idea ?



Harold Mansfield
03-06-2009, 08:10 PM
There was a similar thread by Aaron Hats a while back about switching his existing domains around, and I thought it was a bad idea, but now I find that I have an identity problem.

When I started one of my blogs in 2007 about Dance Music/Nightclubbing and Festivals, 124bpms.com (124 Beats Per Minute), I had no idea there was a site called BPM Magazine (bpmmagazine.net) since 2005, they write about Music/Tech/Nightlife/Style.

Now I find myself wanting to separate my identity as far from them as possible, and clear up any "copy cat" insinuations, although no one has even compared the two, or mentioned it to me.

Of course my site is now solid. Decent traffic, some sales, and a decent following, not to mention I have the respect of quite a few industry producers promoters and artists....some even hound me to make sure I get their stuff posted up.

So I have these other domains:
DanceXTC.com, TranceXTC.com, and HouseXTC.com, that I actually like better than the one that I am using.

I would rather not move the site to another domain, but I would like to brand myself with a new name change, (probably using Dance XTC which I have redirected), and not lose my place for the search terms that I am ranked for.

I could use a little advice as to how to proceed, or if I should even worry about it.

One of my thoughts was to put a flash landing page on each of them, directing back to the original domain, and just do a link campaign on them, but I really don't know which way is best to proceed.

vangogh
03-06-2009, 08:41 PM
Moving will have some pros and cons and only you can decide which is more important. The branding thing is certainly one pro and possible the new keywords you'll be using. The three domains you might use might be the better keyword options, though I don't know the industry and you do.

About a year ago I moved my site to a new domain so I'll share my experience. You may or may not remember, but my site used to be on yellowhousehosting.com, which naturally branded me as a web host. Since hosting was never my primary service, I thought it very important to move to a new domain which better reflected what I do. In my case I felt that even if I lost all the links and traffic I was getting it would still be worth it.

I bought the new domain and let it sit for awhile. I wasn't sure if it would matter, but I thought I'd let it age a bit. I wrote a post linking to a coming soon page so the search engines would find and index it. The domain ended up sitting for a year, mostly because I never found the time to work on the new design I wanted.

When I finally did my first step was rebuilding my site on the new domain. I gave it a new design and rewrote much of the content. I installed WordPress and imported all my posts. The biggest pain was editing all the internal links since I use absoloute URLs. Most of the work was setting up the new site. I was able to do all that behind the scenes.

I did start mentioning I would be moving on my blog to make sure people would be aware. I wanted my subscribers to know just in case redirection didn't work. When I was ready I edited my .htaccess file on the old domain for 301 redirects to the new site. In my case I had also changed the permalinks so I ended up mapping the redirection page to page and had to write a few hundred lines of code. Ideally you'll keep the same URL structure. If you do then it's only a couple or three lines of code.

I also changed the feed at FeedBurner to the new feed. I wrote one last post on the old site to let people know I had moved with a link to the new site and the new feed in case the feed redirection didn't work.

Since I had all the old URLs in a text file to help with the redirection I tested each one in the browser to make sure the redirects worked. A few didn't, which I had to troubleshoot, but for the most part it went fine.

Then I sat back and hoped it all worked.

For a few weeks my old pages ranked and traffic found me through the redirects. I briefly saw a drop in search traffic, but it came back pretty quick. In truth I never really noticed any loss of search traffic from Google. Yahoo still seems to be getting the redirection wrong and ranks the old site, but people still get redirected to the new one. MSN never showed me much love and I didn't really care how things affected my traffic there.

I did notice a drop in subscribers. I'm not sure if it was part bots that never made it to the new site or if people simple unsubscribed. Eventually the subscriber numbers came back, though I'm not sure now if it was people finding me again or just new subscribers.

The key is really getting the redirection right. Take your time with it and be as prepared as you can in advance. Expect to have some losses even if you do everything right. Not that it's so important, but my PR still hasn't come back, though search traffic never left. I'm guessing I did lose subscribers when I moved, though I figure if they didn't find me again they probably weren't all that interested in the first place.

Overall I'm happy I moved. I think in my case it was important to brand myself as a web designer and SEO instead of a web host. Almost immediately my business picked up quite a bit and has continued to grow ever since.

Think about the reasons you want to move and if it's really necessary. It was a lot of work to move and though everything ultimately went well I'm not sure it would have been worth it had the branding been so important. All three of the new domains sound good, but so is your old domain. If people know you already then do you really need to separate yourself from a similar domain. It's ok to change, but make sure you have a good reason to do so.

Let me know if you have more questions. I've probably left a few things out above.

Harold Mansfield
03-06-2009, 08:57 PM
The other thing I was thinking about was to start marketing the new domain as an alter ego in articles and such, and linking it, instead of the old domain, and just let people come to the old domain.

Sort of like a "Dance XTC at 124 Beats Per Minute" sort of thing.

I also have though about letting lesser known DJ's promote themselves through a site podcast, and calling that DanceXTC.

Everything that you just described...I don't want to do because I know I would screw up the tech side of it.

vangogh
03-06-2009, 11:49 PM
Understandable if you don't want to do what I described, but it's really not as hard as it sounds. The redirects are fairly easy. If the URLs stay the same (with the exception of the domain) it's just a couple lines of code and I'd be happy to post them for you. If it's the line by line thing it's also easy. It's basically the same line of code over and over again, but you're pasting in the different individual URLs. If your feed is through FeedBurner it takes about 5 seconds to change.

I'm not trying to convince you to go ahead and move the domain, but want you to know the technical stuff isn't as hard as it sounds. It's more about making sure you covered all the bases.

Still if you don't feel the need to change you're probably better off leaving things as they are.

royhunters
08-05-2009, 01:10 AM
Vangogh,

Why the use of absolute URL's in your links? I can think of a couple minor reasons but would like to know why you choose to do it this way in case I am missing something.

vangogh
08-05-2009, 01:22 PM
The absolute URLs are mostly for when my content ends up on another site or another medium. For example let's say someone steals your content. It sucks, but it happens. If the URLs are relative they link to the stolen content. If the URLs are absolute they link back to your original content.

Also if you publish a feed then the feedreader will need absolute URLs to display images and link properly. It won't be able to find either relatively on the desktop.

I used to think it was easier to work with relative URLs in case you had to move the site around, but over the years I've found other ways to easily change the URLs if needed and I think the absolute URLs do offer some advantages.

rhinoseo
01-27-2010, 09:39 PM
Main things to consider when changing a domain name are how much traction in search engines do you have with the current domain? How much will you lose. Also is the new domain an older established domain? That alone might be worth the switch. One this I will say is that the new domain options compared to the old can have a lot more strength with dance related search terms. However I believe that the day where domain name can sway SE strength will come to and end sooner than later. Ultimately... aside from all SEO concerns, it is a branding issue. Can your users more easily identify you with a domain like you suggest vs the old one? I think in your case the pros outweigh the cons because you can do a switch without too much hassle.

Paul Elliott
02-04-2010, 11:54 AM
The absolute URLs are mostly for when my content ends up on another site or another medium. For example let's say someone steals your content. It sucks, but it happens. If the URLs are relative they link to the stolen content. If the URLs are absolute they link back to your original content.

Also if you publish a feed then the feedreader will need absolute URLs to display images and link properly. It won't be able to find either relatively on the desktop.

I used to think it was easier to work with relative URLs in case you had to move the site around, but over the years I've found other ways to easily change the URLs if needed and I think the absolute URLs do offer some advantages.

Thank you for this simple explanation, Steve.

Paul

vangogh
02-04-2010, 02:20 PM
Glad to help Paul.