confessions of a web developer
Monday, May 17th, 2010
For the last few years I have been hosting my personal website and email on the domain ChrisBlackwell.org. I actually ended up moving to that domain from my original longer domain theChrisBlackwell.com. I originally registered that domain because I was obsessed with having to use a .com domain for my website.
After a while I noticed that a lot of people were using .org for their personal websites, and since I could get ChrisBlackwell.org and drop “the” from the domain, I switched over. I never really liked the .org domain. After all, I’m not an organization or a non-profit. It also never really fit how I view the web in the future, as a domain-less area, where what’s in the domain doesn’t really matter.
I decided last month to register a couple of name based domains, meaning domains that specifically target being used for personal websites and vCards. I registered both ChrisBlackwell.me and ChrisBlackwell.name. While the ChrisBlackwell.name domain really specifies that it is meant to be used for personal websites, I don’t really like 4 digit TLDs. After pondering on this for a month, and figuring out what the SEO implications might be, I made the switch and now everything is moved over to ChrisBlackwell.me.
The biggest problem with moving your website to a different domain is losing all your links and Google juice that you have spent years building up. Most web developers know we can fix that problem with a single line in a .htaccess file hosted on the old domain:
Redirect 301 / http://new-domain.tld
The much bigger problem I have is with domain age and relevance. My old domain (chrisblackwell.org) has been registered for several years, and in the eyes of Google is a trusted site. My new domain (chrisblackwell.me) has only been registered for a month and a half, and in the eyes of Google, doesn’t have a lot of history. While I’m hoping that having the old domain forward over will carry forward some of that trust, I can’t be certain of that.
The other problem, and this is only in theory, is that Google trusts the main three top level domains the most (.com, .net and .org). All the other domains like .name, .biz, .info, and maybe .me don’t get as much credibility as their higher level counterparts. This is a problem I think needs to go away as soon as possible. The notion that you have to have a top level domain to get good search engine rankings has led people to come up with either ridiculously long domain names, or ridiculously sounding company names.
I’m over it! I don’t care about the SEO implications because I believe this is the right thing to do. This website has never been about making everything 100 percent perfect, or I wouldn’t have built it in HTML5 and CSS3. This website is about testing new waters, being on the leading edge, and finding out how we can all make this a better Internet for everyone.
I’d really like to hear what you think. Did I make the right move, or am I being foolish? Do you trust top level domains more, or do you think they just don’t matter anymore?
Tags: Domains, Google, htaccess, SEO, vCards, Web Standards
Posted in Web Development | 2 Comments »