Life, the Universe and the Internet

I have a dvd review site that has been running in one format or another since the year 2000. The site itself was reasonably successful and made a fair profit at times. Back in the summer of last year the core team on the site decided that we needed to expand in order to future proof the site. DVD as a format probably now has a limited lifespan and we wanted to expand into other areas such as games, music and the new HD formats for movies.

We all agreed that the domain name needed to change as the name was very DVD specific. The site was called dvdlard.co.uk (don’t ask it’s a long story ). So we agreed that when the site was launched we would change the domain name to reflect the change. So the site was now to be called www.digitallard.com.

I was well aware that such a change could have a big impact on traffic, search engine hits etc. so I tried to do everything I could to minimise the hit. I arranged every single page off the old url to redirect to the new site, and I also set the redirects up with proper 301 error messages so that the search engines would know that the pages have moved somewhere else.

I also started going through all of the back links and trying to get those sites to update those links including DMOZ (still pending). To try and boost things along I also had a press release written which I distributed through the likes of PRWeb. I also ensured all the tools were in place like a google site map, rss feeds etc.

Despite all of these things, the change has had a devastating result on traffic. The site has been running for about one month now and traffic is at it’s lowest in years. I can see that the search engines know about all of the site pages but they are all ranking very low indeed. Income is at an all time low too and I think I may have to start doing some adwords promotion to try and bring people in.

Things are improving very slowly and I do believe that things will return to normal, but the one lesson I’ve learned from all of this is to not underestimate the impact of changing a domain name as it’s had a major impact for me. If anyone reading this has experience of this and has any tips, please feel free to comment it would be more than welcome.

I’m still fine tuning my brand new shiny blog and one thing I decided to try and do was use permalinks. For those of you that my not be familiar with the term I was just going to describe it here but I realized that a much better description is available from wikipedia. So here is an excerpt.

A permalink is a URL that points to a specific blogging entry even after the entry has passed from the front page into the blog archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, its use avoids link rot. Most modern weblogging and content-syndication software systems, including Wordpress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, RapidWeaver, Pivot and Blogger, support such links. Other types of websites use permalinks, too, but the term itself is most common within the blogosphere. Permalink is a portmanteau word made from permanent link and is often simply stated so as to be human-readable.

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