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18 months ago, I knew absolutely nothing about operating a website. Thanks to my determination, most of my spare time lost to sufing for information and learning from mistakes... and also thanks largely to this website, I have come a long way. However, I still have big holes in my knowledge, I still consider myself an amateur and I'm suffering long term problems from errors I made early on (due to my lack of knowledge).
I have realised my major problems are as follows...
Firstly, I do not own the .com version of my domain name (I have a few domain names but this is the one I work on). I only own the .info and the .org (the .info is where the live site is. In fact, the .info TLD has brought me a few visitors I might not otherwise have got, due to the fact that the search terms included 'info', as it is a geographical information community site but that's by the by.
I started the website as a hobby, primarily to teach myself about my niche and attract enthusiastic members but also to teach myself about being a webmaster. I have come to the point where I want to really push the site forward but the .com version of my domain name is taken and is a major and hugely successful rival site, so there is no hope of getting the .com version. I am also a little concerned that as my site grows, that big site may cause me probems with naming copyright.
Another problem is the fact that in my hopeless early on inexperience, I altered the URL structure shortly after a deep crawl from Google and 14 months on the old URL's are still causing me issues even though all the old ones are producing 404 headers. (13,500 incorrect URL's vs 154 correct ones). It's a mess to be honest.
On the upside, I have a PR4 site that has stable IBL's and a loyal core of members that keep the community alive. Recently, the search engine rank has showed signs of improvement after I moved away from subdomain sections to directory sections (I kept just 2 subdomains as I plan to expand them massively). I also have no apparent penalties. I get around 300 absolute unique search engine referrals per day, not much for a site online for 18 months but it keeps us ticking over.
I'm convinced a rebranding and new URL is what I need to move forward and I have been carefully researching available .com names and have settled on one, and I have aquired the .com, .org, .net versions. It is a 2 word domain without hyphen. I am considering obtaining the reverse versions also. Most agree that .com is king and I was quite pleased with myself for realising this word combination.
I've searched through the archives here carefully and I'm still very confused and worried about moving domains. I need to know in clear terms what are the risks, how to avoid them, the correct way to mod rewrite all the existing pages to the new main URL, should I leave the old IBL's as the are, will I lose the domain ageing factor... everything.
So... can you help? I've worked so hard on this community and my members love the place... it would be such a shame for me to ruin it by screwing up this move. I just wish i'd known a year ago what I know now.
[edited by: caveman at 5:54 pm (utc) on July 11, 2006]
If your current .org domain, which I understand to be the same words that appear in your competitor's .com version of the domain, is generic in nature (e.g., squarewidgets.org), then in all likelihood the name is not trademarkable and you should have no issues on that front. If OTOH, the name is more unique and possibly trademarkable, then yes, that might be an argument for moving to another domain name.
Changing domains certainly can cause loss of rankings/traffic for extended periods, especially in Google, so IMO the determining factors are how important is the name change, how much traffic might I lose and will I be better off in 18-24 months if I make the change. Since your traffic base is relatively low, if you can stand the financial set back, and if there are good reasons to change domains, then I probably would go for it.
One further advantage of changing domains in this case is that you could redirect specific pages from the old site to the new, and get the new site set up properly without worrying about the old URI's anymore. That might be a somewhat tedious process, but possibly worth it in your situation.
Just a little extra thought too: I am not sure I'd take the current domain apart once your successfully made a switch to a new domain. Since you own the .org version of a successful competitor's .com, there are almost certainly things you could do with the existing domain to irriate the competitor. (And I'm not talking sneaky, nasty stuff BTW...just good clean marketing and promotional stuff...all above board. One example: Think PPC.) ;-)
I've been thinking. Many people ask similar questions to mine but in separate threads. I wonder if this process I am about to embark on would make an interesting case study. I could describe to you exactly what I am doing, the results as they happen, post the htaccess files I use for the process of moving... everything.
It would of course be a long term thread but might answer a lot of questions. What do you think?
Here are the questions I really need answering as I keep reading conflicting opinion...
* Does domain ageing transfer to the new domain with a 301 redirect?
* Is there a htaccess method I can use to specifically and individually 301 each page from old domain to new domain, without just redirecting everything to the new domain homepage?
* If I tell all sites that link to me to change the address, will I get hit with a penalty for gaining too many links too fast?
* I will leave the old domain with the 301 active for a year... will that be long enough?
[edited by: Asia_Expat at 12:21 am (utc) on July 12, 2006]
* Is there a htaccess method I can use to specifically and individually 301 each page from old domain to new domain, without just redirecting everything to the new domain homepage?
Yes, you can redirect each page on the old domain to its corresponding page on the new domain -- and do all of these redirects using only one to four lines of code in total. See Apache mod_rewrite or the RedirectMatch directive in Apache mod_alias.
Jim
So... do these look good?...
Firstly, for the main URL, I figure...
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ h**p://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
... and for my subdomains...
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} (.*)\olddomain\.info
RewriteRule ^(.*) h**p://%1newdoman.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Did I get those right?
[edited by: caveman at 5:24 am (utc) on July 12, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] Delinked links [/edit] [/edit][/1]
[edited by: Asia_Expat at 5:27 am (utc) on July 12, 2006]
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ h**p://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
* If I tell all sites that link to me to change the address, will I get hit with a penalty for gaining too many links too fast?
I checked all headers and they are being produced correctly and in the right places.
I also changed and re-submitted sitemaps to G and Y.
[edited by: Asia_Expat at 2:45 pm (utc) on July 17, 2006]
No changes in results yet.
[edited by: Asia_Expat at 5:39 pm (utc) on July 18, 2006]
Yahoo are still showing results with both domains.
Incidentally, I've been trying to get a DMOZ listing for years... just a week after the domain name change, I got my first ODP listing :-)
Just goes to show what's in a name ;-)
