October 13, 2007
Moving Advice?
Since moving from http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu to http://grandtextauto.org, I’ve noticed some problems. Technorati, for example, thinks the two URLs point to two different blogs — and, even after “claiming” both on Technorati’s site, I can’t find a way to tell it they’re the same blog. We also had some serious trouble getting Google to pay attention — and now I notice we’re often not one of the top Google hits for our own posts, even after doing a “301” permanent redirect of all our old pages. Anyone out there have advice or experience with these sorts of issues?
October 13th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
There’s no automated way to tell Technorati a URL is a duplicate. I had to submit a help ticket recently to have the same problem fixed.
October 13th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
My experience won’t be very helpful… when I moved to a new school about 4 or 5 years ago, I had the host of my old academic website and weblog redirect to the new site, and after a handful of prominent blogs mentioned that I moved, Google found my new pages pretty quickly. As I recall, within a week or two all seemed fine. Of course, that was some time ago… maybe the shady search engine optimizers have exploited so many tricks that the natural, organic changeover that I experienced is more complicated now.
The next time I get the chance I’ll do a search-and-replace in my blog and change all my links to GTA permalinks … I’m assuming all I need to do is replace the domain name?
October 13th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Google will catch up eventually, but it may be a week or two for a reindexing. A 301 redirect is the right way to do it.
October 14th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Steve, thanks for pointing out the help ticket mechanism. I hope they’re willing to bring together all the various Technorati things from both versions of the blog (authority, fans, blog reactions) rather than just dispose of the old URL and its associated information. We don’t write this blog for Technorati’s sake, but it would be a shame to kill the 4 years of data they’ve gathered.
Dennis, it would be great if you went through and changed all your permalink references to GTxA! Yes, all you should need to do is change instances of “grandtextauto.gatech.edu” to “grandtextauto.org”.
October 14th, 2007 at 10:33 am
“Successfully replaced 37 records.”
October 14th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Google webmaster central may help:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Try claiming both domains. I think there’s also a way to specify that you redirected one to the other…
It’s likely you won’t carry as much influence in Google with the new domain. Subdomains of a popular site, and especially EDU domains, are given more trust… But you should be able to transfer all the raw PageRank with 301s.
Alex
October 14th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Alex, thanks for the pointer. Unfortunately, even though I was able to verify myself for both domains, I couldn’t find a way to tell Google about the redirect. Any further pointers on where to look?
One thing I did find on the Google site was confirmation that 301 redirecting and getting people to change their in-links are both recommended strategies:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34464&topic=8523
Thanks Dennis!
October 14th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Noah, I’m not sure exactly where that function is exactly; I only remember reading about it! I’ll see if I can find more details…
Also, this post seems to mention it takes time for traffic to build up again:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/002343.shtml
I’m sure it’ll work out in a few weeks!
Alex
October 15th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Alex, thanks for the link. Yes, it looks like the main thing I should do is: be patient. Google and Yahoo will figure this out in time, given the 301 redirection, and MSN apparently will never figure it out (if the SEO Book link is correct) no matter what we do.
As for Technorati, I hope the work week may bring a response to my help ticket.