Paul Allen has written a post that is well worth the read if you’re looking at moving your blog to a new domain (always a scary thing to do).
Unfortunately Paul learnt a lesson the hard way but is generous enough to share his story so that others might learn from his experience.
It has been over a month since I moved from Blogger to WordPress. Traffic is gradually building up. Google got all the pages and PR should get back in the next update hopefully. I was able to keep my feed readers using Feedburner thankfully. Anyway the sense of ownership is great on your own domain name and webhosting and you feel in control. I must say I learnt much from your amazing tips Darren.
[…] Check it out if you are moving your blog to a new domain name. […]
Ouch. Wish I knew that, oh, 4 months ago! :(
[quote]Ouch. Wish I knew that, oh, 4 months ago! :([/quote]
The timeline on Paul’s domain change is tied too closely with the Big Daddy rollout to conclude his loss of pages was due to the use of 301s. In fact, many sites that didn’t change domain names suffered the same fate.
I switched to my own domain a month ago, and despite putting up a posts saying, “This blog has relocated”, my readership has fallen off. I guess it just takes time to rebuild or for former readers to break their old habits.
I have changed my domain name once, it is good to use the 301 redirect.