Just a few months ago, I blew up my existing blog on gilgamesh.ca and moved it to this domain.
Gilgamesh.ca was a domain name that was personally attractive, but it had no relationship to my consulting company, Sparkplug 9 Technology Services, and it didn’t brand me at all. Plus, I wanted to blog about multiple subjects, but felt I needed to split up those posts so that pictures of my daughter would not be next to stories about the latest web 2.0 company.
Moving domains is like moving your store: will all the old customers still come? And I knew my Google and Technorati ranking would take a huge hit.
But the sooner you make a directional, strategic move like that, the better. Prolonging it will only make the eventual move harder, and more painful.
So I finally pulled the trigger, and instantly, I could feel the pain. As I mentioned here, my Technorati ranking went down from the high 90,000s to almost 1,000,000.
Ouch!
Just a couple of weeks after that, my ranking had improved a couple of hundred thousand spots, but was still horrible.
I buckled down and worked hard to improve it:
- I emailed all bloggers (or commented on their sites) who had linked to gilgamesh.ca, asking them to please update their links
- I redoubled my efforts to write great content that people would link to from their blogs
- I started adding Technorati tags to all my posts religiously … hoping to make myself more discoverable on Technorati
- I did (as I had before) lots of commenting on others’ blogs … which of course then has a link back to this blog, which hopefully people will see and follow
- I started to leave lots of trackbacks – just recently, actually – because bloggers who know you link to them are much more likely to link back
- And, fortunately, I just got lucky with a few posts that 6 or 7 bloggers picked up and linked to, including Dave Winer (the most recent post that got a lot of attention was this one on Rocketboom)
Today, is a good day for bizhack: not only is bizhack finally above water, its Technorati rating is higher than gilgamesh.ca ever got: 89,899.
From an overall perspective, that’s not much to celebrate – if I had stayed at gilgamesh.ca, I’d probably be in the 50K range right now. So I’m only just above water.
But it’s been a tough 2 months to move up over 900,000 places on Technorati, and I’m pleased with that. And now bizhack is well positioned to continue to improve.
If you have any ideas on that, by the way, I’d love to hear them – just add a comment!
[tags] blogging, pagerank, technorati, bizhack, gilgamesh.ca, john koetsier [/tags]