welcome to the funcave

act 12: get along little dogies!

even with the new site up & its internal links updated, there was still the issue of folks either using old links or being directed by search engines to the old site.

herding stragglers over to your new site is a totally subjective area & depends largely on how much time & effort you want to expend. it’s prolly also directly proportional to things like…

• the amount of truly useful or compelling information you have on your blog
• the amount of “regular” traffic you have
• how much your previous address was disseminated
• how much your old site shows up in search engines

at a minimum…you want to make it very obvious that your site has moved to a new location.

but realize that…

no matter how much cleanup you do…

count on a good 35–50% traffic loss right off the bat. them’s the breaks, folks.

in my case, i changed the site settings in blogger to only show 1 post at the old funcave. i then drafted & published a final post at the old funcave about the move. i made nearly everything in that post into links, any of which will immediately transport someone over here to the new site when clicked.

that took care of anyone still using the main address of the old blog, but what about visitors coming from search engines?

i decided on a two-pronged approach…

first, i made some heavy modifications to the sidebar elements of the old funcave’s site template, basically turning everything in the sidebar into redirection links. since the sidebar shows up on every page, regardless of how old the post actually is, it’s prolly the best tool you’ll have to capture traffic coming in from search engines.

second, since i had a good number of multi-post series which seemed to garner a lot of traffic…

i again used the stats generated by sitemeter to actually map out the most popular multi-part content on my old site.

once more…blogjet swooped in to save the day.

blogjet enabled me to quickly batch update the key links in those posts on the old site so that they now point to the new site.

at most, someone might read a single post in a given series on the old funcave now, before getting transported automagically to the new location.

but…

if i had simply set up my original blog under my own domain from the very beginning…

99% of everything that is discussed in in acts 10 through 12…

and basically 100% of the cleanup work in blogjet…

would have not been necessary at all!

so get your stuff under your own domain from the very outset…seriously.

that’s an important enough point to bear repeating more than a couple of times…

begin act 13

|| posted by chris under migration, wordpress || || ||