Engaging in ‘high risk’ activity — moving my blog

I’ve decided to take the plunge and move my blog to a more tra­di­tion­al .com domain type (rather than the .net that I cur­rently use). I’m going to keep the .net domain for more eso­ter­ic things, private devel­op­ment serv­er, etc. If you’re read­ing this on the old blog (blog.bradgrier.net), then please jump over to the new…


I’ve decided to take the plunge and move my blog to a more tra­di­tion­al .com domain type (rather than the .net that I cur­rently use). I’m going to keep the .net domain for more eso­ter­ic things, private devel­op­ment serv­er, etc.

If you’re read­ing this on the old blog (blog.bradgrier.net), then please jump over to the new one, book­mark it, and check it out to make sure it works as you expect. You can find it at blog.bradgrier.com.

The dot-com is more com­mon, people have a stand­ard ‘expect­a­tion ‘of a site or blog when it has a .com address. A .net address seems to have a dif­fer­ent ‘expect­a­tion’. And I felt the need to try out a new provider.

So, this will mean a bit of change:

  • RSS feeds — already moved my feed­burn­er redir­ects so there should be no disruption
  • Incom­ing links — not sure what to do about this yet. Incom­ing links add value to your Google rank­ing, so this trans­ition will cost me some of that pre­cious Google Juice
  • Site duplic­a­tion — some of the art­icles I’ve been read­ing about mov­ing domains sug­gest main­tain­ing duplic­ate sites for a few months. I’m think­ing about this. It may work, but I’d cus­tom­ize the con­tent so that some sort of ‘domain moved’ mes­sage is appen­ded to the feeds etc

But, I’m not the expert here, just the guy doing the work. Do you have any thoughts or opin­ions about mov­ing domains? What should I watch out for? What should I do differently?

Photo: Dav­id Asch

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2 responses to “Engaging in ‘high risk’ activity — moving my blog”

  1. Jamie Grove - How Not To Write Avatar

    Hi, Brad.

    One thing you’ll want to do is set up 301 redir­ects for all of the exist­ing pages on yoursite. The 301 redir­ect will tell search engines that your con­tent has per­man­ently moved to a new home. This will enable you to main­tain the link-love gained from oth­er sites as well as keep­ing the age of your pages intact.

    Looks like you’re using Apache for the web serv­er so this is pretty easy. You just add a few simple lines to the .htac­cess file in you root web con­tent dir­ect­ory (Google htac­cess 301 redir­ect for an example).

    As an altern­at­ive, you could also install the Redir­ec­tion plu­gin for Word­Press. This will allow you to set up redir­ects right inside Word­Press admin. How­ever, it means you also need to leave Word­Press on the old site…

    The htac­cess redir­ect is prob­ably the best option, espe­cially if you are mov­ing the whole site com­plete and leav­ing noth­ing behind.

  2. bgrier Avatar

    Hi Jam­ie, thanks for the thought­ful suggestions!

    I was think­ing 301s would work, but had­n’t star­ted explor­ing them yet, nor had any idea on how to imple­ment them. The htac­cess advice is help­ful, and likely the way I’ll go.

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