About four months ago, I moved out of the crippledcollie.com domain into this domain — acornabbey.com. Not only is a domain change a tedious and challenging process, even for a nerd. There also is the risk of losing readers.
Frankly, I didn’t do the best of all possible jobs. I went to quite a lot of trouble to move all the posts and photos (about 900 posts and more than 1,000 photos) from the old blog to the new blog. I assumed that Google would find, and index, all those posts at the new acornabbey.com domain. I was wrong. I recently figured out that Google would probably never find all the older material unless I submitted a “site map” to Google, using Google’s Webmaster Tools. That has now been done, and I’m waiting for Google to finish re-indexing everything.
Another step that I needed to take was to automatically redirect traffic from the old blog to the new blog. That was relatively easy, using an .htaccess file on the old server to map everything to the new domain and redirect everything to the new domain.
These changes are kicking in, and traffic to acornabbey.com has more than doubled. I expect it to increase even more once Google finishes indexing all the old posts, which go back to 2007. I’ve posted on many different subjects over the years and show up in a lot of Google searches on obscure subjects such as “Pleides,” “iambic pentameter,” or “biscuits and gravy.”
2 Comments
I remember when I first found crippledcollie.com. My wife and I were thinking about building the same house as the Abbey and simply stumbled across it doing an image search. I saved the bookmark and have kept it ever since. I check it for updates on simple living and will follow it wherever it goes.
Thanks, Daniel!
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