Over the past few weeks I’ve closed down two websites and moved all the content from them over to this one. I’ve written about the process in a couple of blog posts, How to move and merge WordPress databases from one server to another and How to set up a 301 redirect in cPanel.
In this post I want to tell you about a couple of things I’ve noticed during the transfer process.
Domain name extension snobbery
I’m almost convinced that such a thing as domain name extension snobbery exists. It stands to reason. We, as humans, first judge everything at face value; the people we meet, the books we read. It’s only later, when we have become accustomed to something we had no previous experience of, that our opinions change.
In the online world the .com domain extension is king. It wipes the floor with everything else. It stands to reason that a site listed in Google’s search results with a domain name that ends in anything other than .com is likely to be ignored by the majority of people. For example, somebody from the United States may not click on a .co.uk result just because it ends in .co.uk as they perceive it as irrelevant to them. The same could be said for somebody from Australia or Canada.
I don’t think this is always the case, but I believe it could be the case some of the time.
This is why:
1) I do it myself for certain domain extensions. Not for .co.uk (as I’m from the UK), .com or .net, but I’ve certainly done it for .pl and others.
2) My first choice domain for this new site already existed and ended in .co.uk, and although I set up the 301 redirects and Google indexed those quite quickly, I saw a noticeable drop in traffic. I believe one of the main reasons (and this is really just speculation) was because of the .co.uk extension.
I believe some people saw the .co.uk extension in the search results and that put them off clicking on the link to my page(s). I know this won’t be the case every time, but if it happens in 50% of the searches (or more) where the site is listed and the traffic halves (or worse) then that is quite a significant drop, especially if the site was getting hundreds or thousands of visitors a day.
Bite the bullet
In the back of my mind I think I always knew that I needed a .com address for this project. A couple of days ago I bit the bullet and made the purchase and once again set about downloading files, exporting/importing databases and creating hundreds of 301 redirects. Luckily this time around, it didn’t take me too long as I used the “find and replace” feature in Notepad to change details in the existing .htaccess files.
I made this decision so soon after the first move because I didn’t want to make it in three, four or five months time when I could have wasted months of work and have to start all over again. I figured that domain name snobbery, either intentional or not, was an actuality and I don’t want to make it any harder than it need be to get traffic in an already crowded niche.
301 redirects and quick indexing
The other main point I want to make in this post is the speed in which Google has re-indexed some of my pages after setting up the 301 redirects.
In times gone by Google was very slow at doing this. It doesn’t seem to be the case any longer. Three of the four phrases I checked in Google’s search results already show the new domain (mydigitialinternet.com). And I only set up the redirects yesterday, in fact, it’s actually less than twenty-four hours ago.
What next?
The next stage of the transfer is to go through the site to find and fix problems such as broken links, missing images, typos etc. As I do this I’ll look for internal linking opportunities and update older posts and delete any more crap I come across. There’s bound to be a few candidates for the chop as I have noticed some very poor writing in my older posts.
On the creation of new content; I’ve got loads of ideas for articles for this site and ideas to develop elsewhere. It’s going to be an interesting time ahead…
What do you think of the domain name snobbery idea? Does it exist? Are you a victim or perhaps a practitioner?
I have to agree with you to a point Stephen. There is definitely some form of preferential selection going on.
At least that’s what I’d rather call it.
There are some urls I simply won’t click.. it’s just too risky.
I’m not even sure that the TLD’s like .us or .uk really cause users from those countries to trust the link more.
I think it has a lot to do with the first part of the domain name.. plus the extension that comes after the /
I don’t think there’s any question that good keywords in the first and last part of any domain are really the key factors in deciding whether to click or not.
I think most people from the UK would trust a co.uk site as that’s our standard domain extension, but I think you’re right about people from the US (and elsewhere) perhaps not trusting a .us extension. Even though it’s the official extension for the United States it seems to be ignored as people instead opt for .com.
Hey Stephen
Did your site drop out of the rankings at all after the redirect? I followed a similar procedure a month ago and all the new pages showed up almost immediately in Google. Then a week later they started dropping out the rankings. 3 weeks later and only my home page is still ranking, although the other pages are still in the index, they are just buried really deeply. I followed Google’s guidelines to the T and I know it could take a while to bounce back since it was a new domain. Just curious if you experienced a similar result or if yours maintained the rankings as they were before?
Hi Steve,
Yes, it happened to me in almost exactly the same way as it’s happening to you. I didn’t record the exact dates and times, but the pages disappeared for a while, then slowly they started to appear in the results again.
During the quiet time I carried on publishing posts and editing old ones. I also sent out a few tweets and used Pingomatic to ping the important pages. I also added a few bookmarks to Delicious and tried not to worry too much about the rankings. If you’ve done everything correctly your rankings should come back soon, mine did, at pretty much the same level.