My Taekwondo site had sat for years on a subdomain at http://tkd.tomcatuk.net. I felt the site deservered it’s own domain, so I did a little keyword research using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
Ran the keyword “taekwondo” through it, then sorted the results by global search volume. Top of the list (of course) was “Taekwondo” with over 3 million monthly searches. Obviously taekwondo.com, taekwondo.net and taekwondo.org have all been taken up long since. It does surprise me they don’t actually have sites on them, and are just cyber squats. Presumably the owners are waiting to make a fortune selling them.
Next on the list – “Taekwondo Olympics” with 110,000 global searches. Then at number 5 “Olympic Taekwondo” with 49,500 global searches. I know I’m going to have to go for a two word domain, and this looks like the number one keyphrase. Time to visit my registrar.
Bingo – managed to get a domain I really like – http://www.olympictaekwondo.org/ . Quite surprised it was available (checked Alexa and it’s never been registered so no issues with it being used for bad purposes in the past either). Perfect! No dashes or underscores, just two totally relevant keywords with a “reputable” domain extension (I don’t like URLs with special characters or numbers and suspect Google doesn’t either). Anyone who’s tried to register a domain knows just how tricky it is to find any good ones. I was only interested in getting a .com, a .net or a .org. Didn’t want any of the “lesser” extensions such as .biz, .info or .me. As the site is really suitable for an international audience, I wasn’t keen on .co.uk, but would have accepted one of those if the name was good enough.
Next step: copy all the content from the old subdomain over to the new FQDN (still on the same server). Since the site uses Blogger for the blog I had to republish that after changing the publishing settings within Blogger. Then write a 301 redirect into the .htaccess file within the old sub domains root by entering this line into it:
redirect 301 / http://www.olympictaekwondo.org/
Publish the .htaccess file on the old sub domain and bingo, any clicks to the old sub domain now get automatically redirected to the new domain. This will include any links on other sites, links in people’s favourites and, of course, most importantly and links in SERPs.
Prior to doing this, I double checked what the Google PageRank was for my pages – Homepage a 3, Blog page a 3 and all content pages a 2. The “About” & “Contact” pages had no PageRank which I kind of think is good of Google as these aren’t pages I expect to rank in SERPs. Individual Blog entries had a mixtures of 0,1 and 2 PR.
I did a little reading up, and it seemed the consensus was that when using a 301 redirect I could reasonably expect Google to start showing the new URL in search results, in the same position as the old pages in about two weeks. It should also reassign” the PR from the old to the new in about that time frame.
The 301 was put in place on July 10th 2009. I’ll amend this post when I have a proven timeframe for the SERPs positions and PR of the new domain matching the old.
***Footnote***
Google’s webmaster guidlines recommend using the “change of address” feature in Webmaster Tools to advise Google of a moved domain. Sounds good, but unfortunately it doesn’t help in this case. They do not give an option to move a subdomain, only a FQDN.
***Update 1***
On July 15th (just five days after implementing the 301) I have PR0 on most pages, notably the homepage and blog homepage. Some of the internal pages seem to have regained their PR2 value already. Google Webmaster tools refuses to make any statements about the PR of the sites’ pages, so presumably at this stage it is still all still ironging itself out.
***Update2***
July 20th – all the PR2′s that appeared have moved down to PR0. Webmaster tools now states 100% of pages have “low” pagerank. Interestingly, this, by default, means no page that’s been crawled is “not yet assigned”. Keyword rankings appear unaffected. Rapidly closing on the supposed 2 week period at this stage.
***Update3***
July 22nd – the new domain shows up in SERPs where the old one used to. Still zero pagerank across entire site. Keyword rankings still appear unaffected, although the site is starting to rank for “Olympic Taekwondo” (about number 15 on Google.co.uk and number 17 on Google.com).
***Update4***
July 25th – no change, and we’re now over the supposed two week period.
***Not exactly an update***
I just read this article by Danny Sullivan on 301′d pages/websites and their backlinks, and now I’m wondering if Google is going to pass the weight of all the backlinks the site had where it was before. Danny’s article kind of suggests that a moved site may well lose all the link juice it previously enjoyed as Google may not count the links to the old domain as still relevant. If that’s the case it’s a tad worrying as I had a LOT of backlinks, and from good places too. A lot of them were, in fact, what I would deem “the perfect link” in that:
1. MOST IMPORTANTLY – I didn’t ask for them.
2. They were from sites on topic with mine.
3. A lot of them were deep links to my site’s content with perfect anchor text.
If I’ve really lost all that link juice, yikes.
Tags: Google
I have had this conversation with a client before when they asked me about 301′s. So I decided to just experiment with it myself, by doing a 301 on one of my personal websites and I will see how it goes. I used the .htaccess method. So we will see what happens! I am hoping at minimum that the SERPS are not affected in any drastic way… really that’s my main concern. PR makes no difference if rankings don’t fall in my opinion. Maybe the PR did transfer, but it’s just not showing yet for you? if your rankings an unchanged I would think the 301′s purposes was fullfilled in terms of seo.
Sorry – the post was rather long. The quick answer is…no change in SERPs noticed at all. Bear in mind it’s quite a small site in a niche topic who’s competition is a lot of very poorly designed websites. Will be making one last entry on this post once we have an update for the Toolbar, but fully agree with you – SERPs are all important – a little green bar doesn’t really mean all that much
Thanks for stopping by
Did you redirect all the internal pages to the new domain as well? Such as:
Redirect 301 /oldpage.asp http://www.newurl.com/newpage.asp
If not, what is the result when someone goes to an internal page of the old domain?
Hi Alan, no, I didn’t need to as none of the URLs changed, only the domain. So:
oldsite.com/page1.html became:
newsite.com/page1.html
At least, I assumed I wouldn’t need to, and the 301 did work on old results for the previous domain.