Archives for April 2009

Switching things around

This weekend I decided to mix things up on my blog. So I switched things around:

– I took one of my domains, dullest.com, and moved it to TigerTech from pair Networks.
– I installed the latest version of WordPress on dullest.com and copied the MySQL database from mattcutts.com to dullest.com.
– I changed my blog layout to the excellent Thesis theme by Chris Pearson. Previously I was using the Almost Spring theme.
– I added an .htaccess file that will do 302 redirects from www.mattcutts.com/path/file.html to www.dullest.com/path/file.html .

Note: changing your IP address, webhost, domain name, blog template, and blog version all at the same time is the exact opposite of what you should normally do. It’s better to change only one thing at a time so that if something goes horribly wrong, you can trace what caused it.

Also, if you were truly moving a site, a 302 redirect wouldn’t be the right redirect to use–a 301 (permanent) redirect would be better. But if I like these changes, I might migrate mattcutts.com to TigerTech and then migrate my blog from dullest.com back to mattcutts.com. So I’ll stick with a 302 for now.

Sometimes it’s fun to mix things up. It’s not as if I make any money from my blog, so I don’t mind if my search rankings drop for a while. In fact, it will be a pretty interesting experiment to see what happens with search engines and traffic.

I’m sure a bunch of stuff broke; let me know if you see anything especially horrible!

Grabbag questions, April 2009

I scheduled some time today to record video, so I opened up a thread for questions. Post your questions over on Google Moderator so that I can see which questions are popular. I’ve only got 45-60 minutes, so I can’t answer every question, but I’ll try to answer several popular questions and a few interesting questions.

Just like in the past, please ask questions that everyone might be interested in, not just “What happened to my site example.com?”

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