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Migrating blog to your domain? Read the impact analysis.

I recently moved this blog to my own domain.Bloggers using Blogspot and considering migrating to their own domain may like to read the impact analysis.
  • Blogger does a beautiful job of forwarding to new domain so do not worry about broken links.
  • Feed path has changed though existing subscribers were not affected, old feed path works too.
  • Adsense disorientation: 'Public Service' ads started showing right after migration.Adsense must crawl this site again for the ads to be more content contextual.Hmmm.
  • Google Analytics , partly disoriented, it kept recording the visits but the site overlay view does not work. Maybe this needs to reconfigured and old URL dropped. The price: You loose all historical data for all you care. Else, keep the old and new data as two different sites inside your analytics account.
  • Google Sitemaps - Again becomes 'unverified', when new meta tag is inserted, says Google is yet to crawl. Do worry about Google juice.
  • Think about Technorati, Blogstreet and other URL specific rating tools.All need to be remapped and start perhaps from a zero rating. Quite something to worry about, especially if you enjoy blue-blooded rating in blogosphere.
  • Favicon stopped displaying, replaced by Google default.

Other learnings: Domain registrars such as Net4domains say one must upfront pay five years fee for .in domains, unlike .com and .net domains that can be registered and renewed for a single year. The control panel is not very powerful, so you need to raise a ticket for the CNAME records changes that you need.On the other hand, one can opt to pay a little extra and buy your .in domain from Enom (a US based registrar), where the control panel is quite powerful and all your DNS settings propagate globally very-very fast(Enom claims 4 seconds versus several hours and even days for others). Enom allows you to buy .in domains for one year as well. Even if you are buying a general domain such as with .com or .net extension, my suggestion is to go with a registrar that has a powerful control panel that gives you all the controls on a click and propagation is fast.

Incidentally, Wordpress too has a feature that allows you to integrate Wordpress.com blogs to your domains.Setup is much simpler and it works pretty well, unlike Blogger, where we have heard many horror stories and domain integration failures.

Overall, smooth transition on this blog from Blogger point of view. In short term I fear I will loose some search engine directed traffic. But end of it the feel good factor would perhaps keep it going . That is also quite a challenge. Are you upto it?

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hey Rajesh,
Interesting points you have covered.As you have mentioned,one of the most scary things is the Technorati ranking which is the most important in Blogging.As soon as your rank goes up,your traffic also goes up(depending on your blog content) and to start all over again,would create some problems ;-)

Also,the other thing is migration from one blogger to another.I migrated 3 months back and believe me , it was horrifying...So many problems in the migration.

Overall,"Moving to a domain would be great and would add lot of value,keeping the functionality intact".

-Himanshu
(Contributor to http://startups.in/india)
(Blogger at http://thoughtsprevail.blogspot.com)
Shrinidhi Hande said…
Hi.

I found your blog quite interesting and have added it to my blog roll.

I have following question:
Currently 80% of my traffic comes from search engines (For some keywords like Club Mahindra and rejection handling etc, my blog post appears in top 5. It has taken months to reach that position and I fear I may never regain that position if I shift to own domain... WHat do you think?
Rajesh Kumar said…
@ Shrinidhi: Traffic does suffer in short term. My search engine based traffic went to single digit per day and took about two months to come back.

Did I regret moving to my domain? Nope, the entire branding is mine, not Google's.
Shrinidhi Hande said…
My specific questions:
1. Can I continue to use blogger dashboard?

2. Will I regain the current search engine position? (what is the probablity?)
Rajesh Kumar said…
@Srinidhi: 1) Yes 2) Search engine postion - I am not the best person to answer this but in short, the old links continue to be redirected to the new ones.