What happens when I move?

Changing your online address can be as painful a process as moving your physical address.  Say you’re using the standard Blogger domain, such as MyBlog.blogspot.com.  What if you want to move out of your parents house and rent an apartment on your own?  What if you’re sick of this fixer-upper domain and want to spend a few more bucks on a penthouse suite?

The most important consideration when moving your site to a new domain is ensure that your regular visitors and the search engines can find your new location from the old one.  Must like mail gets forwarded by the postal service, you can tell servers to redirect traffic to your new digs.  But not all redirects are created equally.

And the bottom of the pack are JavaScript or HTML meta-tag redirects.  These have been so abused by spammers and people trying to game the search engines that they actually looked down on them.  You’ll sour your Google-juice until the search engines find your new content and are reasonably confident that you’re not trying to pull a fast one.  As far as the search engines are concerned, you left town without leaving a forwarding address.  At least most of your visitors will find your new location.

The best options are server redirects better known by their response codes.  A 301 redirect is what you want.  It tells both browsers and search engines that your content has permanently moved to a different location.  No Google-juice is spilt and your visitors will be quickly redirected to the new site.  These redirects require fiddling with the server, though some services such as Blogger will allow you to configure it through their settings pages.  In Blogger’s case, you’ll find it at Dashboard –> Settings –> Publishing.  When you set up a custom domain, Blogger does the right thing and sets up 301 redirects from your old URLs to the new ones.  However, that requires you to continue using Blogger as your blogging engine.

One option that is occasionally mistaken for a 301 redirect is a 302 redirect.  302’s are used for temporary redirections (eg: pointing everything at an “Our site is down for maintenance” page).  These are designed to redirect human visitors while not affecting standing with search engines.  Just make sure that your temporary redirects are indeed temporary.  Occasionally, either by typo or misinformation, someone uses 302 redirects instead of 301’s.  Like the JavaScript and meta-tag redirects, it’ll get your human visitors there but will eventually spoil your Google-juice.

Unlike the real world, you can own your address on the Internet and move it from server to server without any loss of SEO or visitor traffic.  In geek-speak, domain name servers translate friendly domain names – such as bloggingfrontier.com – into an IP address – 69.4.229.64 in this case.  That blob of numbers points to a unique server and all traffic to bloggingfrontier.com will be sent there.  If you want to change to a new server, you just tell the domain name servers to point your domain to a new IP address and you’re good to go.