On July 3rd (my birthday) I moved from www.petersen-inc.dk to www.thebetanews.com. In this series I explain my progress week for week, building up the traffic, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, Technorati Autority, link backs and so forth.
The Background
Originally petersen-inc.dk was meant to be my personal space with my resume, family photos and other personal stuff, but during winter 2005 I discovered WordPress and the whole blogsphere. Before that I really didn’t think much about the whole blogging thing, except I sometimes found some useful information there. Now everything took a turn. I started to write about new movie trailers, Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft Office 2007 and generally funny stuff I found through StumbleUpon.
In April 2007 I stumbled upon smoblog.com run by Mark Blair. I posted a comment on his site and he wrote back to me, thanking for the post and beautiful music was in the air…well…as beautiful as it gets when two married men talk about social media and other stuff. At that point I started to focus my attention on the blogsphere. My traffic wasn’t anything to brag about (still isn’t, but I’m optimistic). I learned my first lesson: Comment on other blogs! Anyway to make an already too long story short. I read and commented on several blogs and thanks to Wendy’s Monday Motivationn I applied as co-writer on Connected Internet and this is where the story begins…
Why Move To Another Domain?
Everton Blair from Connected Internet and I had some email correspondance about my site and it’s name. Everton gave me the kick in the behind that I needed by saying and I quote: “that has a really bad url to be honest mate”. He was right. So I spent some time thinking of a good name and I ended up with thebetanews.com. Of course, afterwards I read a lot of posts about clever webpages that generate a domain for you, based on some keywords. So now I have a .com domain and I’ve set up WordPress on the new domain what now?
The Preparation
I researched quite a bit on various blogs and quickly realised what I had to do in order to make the move as smoothless as possible for my readers (and the search engines). One thing is making it easy for your readers, but what about yourself? All my posts, comments, plugins, settings, options, feeds and all the other blog stuff. How can I move that with me? I tried two things. I’m a bit impatient, so I wanted to get started on the new domain as fast as possible. I used the Export function in WordPress and imported it on the new domain, then I downloaded my plugins and theme and uploaded it to the new domain. I activated the plugins and expected everything to be peachy! My posts and comments were there, but the settings weren’t and the tags were made into categories. I honestly thought I could cheat by moving them into the same subfolder (/blog) as on petersen-inc.dk, but that didn’t work. So now I had a blog installed in a subfolder with A LOT of categories and with no settings, no SEO and days of work ahead of me.
Now I mentioned I tried two things during the move, here comes the good part. I deleted the whole thing, created a new database (MySQL 5 this time) and exported my database through MySQLAdmin instead of WordPress’ export. Then I found a small program that goes through your exported SQL database and replaced www.petersen-inc.dk with www.thebetanews.com. I copied the entire text from the database into MySQLAdmin on thebetanews.com and BANG. I had all my settings, tags, posts, comments everything was good to go once I activated the plugins. What a relief!
I wrote a post on petersen-inc.dk that I was moving to thebetanews.com and I got some comments on that. Good now my readers knew about it, but how about the casual readers, the ones that drop by once in a while, the ones looking for a Joost invite or those from the meme lists. Redirection is the answer and boy is that simple. For the technical minded ones I used the 301 redirect. It basically means my site has moved permanently to a new domain. So I added some code to .htaccess on petersen-inc.dk:
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.thebetanews.com/$1 [R=301,L]
and voila everything got redirected.
What Happened With The Traffic?
Since I’m using the redirection everybody is directed here, even if you type www.petersen-inc.dk it is replaced with www.thebetanews.com, so direct traffic isn’t affected. Seatch engine traffic took a little while more. Just in case I submitted the new domain to Google, uploaded my sitemap and added a robots.txt. This is what my robots.txt looks like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /rss/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /comments/User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?# This is the ad bot for google
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*# Allow Everything
Allow: /*
Now myPage Rank hasn’t moved yet. I’m still unranked and according to Google there are 300 errors reported from the robots.txt. It is all my tags, I don’t know enough about robots.txt, so maybe it’s supposed to be like that. Anyway on July 4th Googlebot visited my site and indexed it and I started to get search engine traffic again.
Technorati
Petersen-inc.dk had a rank of 93,011 with 23 fans and authority of 61. TheBetaNews.com has a rank of 627,802 with 2 fans and authority 10. I tried to update my petersen-inc settings, but that can’t be done for obvious reasons, so as I see it I have to start building relations all over again. Now here is the funny part. I can’t get myself to delete the claim for petersen-inc. For some odd reason it updates with the news I post on thebetanews. I’m still looking into that. I’ll keep an eye on Technorati and keep you updated. Oh and remember please add this blog to your favourites 
Alexa
As you can see my Alexa Rank isn’t anything to brag about. Petersen-inc.dk’s rank was 229,523, where my current is at 1,036,749. It took around 4 days for my rank to update and appear. Again check back next week. Hopefully it has improved by then. By then please review and rate my Alexa profile.
Link Backs
I’m a part of David Airey’s very succesful The Face Behind The Blog list and with about 40 link backs it really hurts. I know the traffic is being redirected, but my old name is still on the list, so I’m in the progress of commenting on all the link backs (again) asking them to update to my new domain. It might sound a bit tedious, but it’s actually very interesting. I’ve already spoken with a lot of nice people out there.
Social Networks
Again just plain manual work. I had to update MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog with my new domain and update the feeds on Wallop, MySpace, Facebook and various other places.
Timing
I’ve been giving this one a lot of thought. I’m not sure if there is such a thing as the right timing in the blogsphere. When is the right time to move to another domain? During the summer when noone is online anyway or around major holidays? In order to draw some attention to my new domain I’m interviewing a number of “celebrity” bloggers and I’m proud to say the first interview with Everton Blair broke my old visitor record. Hopefully the one on Sunday with Wendy will do the same.
What Else?
Then there is the last minor details, like the pictures are broken, since they point on the blog sub-folder I had on my old domain. I’m fixing those as I get along and it still says Petersen Inc. in the browser window(at the top). My feed readers shouldn’t notice the new domain. I simply updated the URL in Feedburner and everything continued without interuption. Surprisingly easy. Now I can continue where I left – viral marketing. Getting my name out there again.
I didn’t get as much attention as Posh and Becks
Goals For Next Week
I have to improve my Alexa rank, Technorati Authority and find out how to get my Page Rank back. Then I have to decide if I want to keep the current theme, go back to the old one or find a totally different one.
This article is a part of Wendy Piersall from emomsathome.com Group Writing Project.
