I should be back over at mattcutts.com. I’m sure some bits have sloshed around in the transition from dullest.com to mattcutts.com–let me know if you see anything truly weird.
I plan to talk sometime soon about what I learned in the process of moving to a completely different domain for a month.
{ 89 comments… read them below or add one }
Let’s see if a comment works… good!
My last comment here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/what-you-should-do-next-week/ and in the Wii post are gone.
Also, still no disclaimer so I assume Google has gagged you in some way?
Dave, I switched over this afternoon, so if you made comment after I backed up the database, that comment is gone. I’ll get my disclaimer back up soon; just trying to decide on a link on the side vs. the top.
So, was the dullest all intentional Matt?
Hey Matt… Interested to see what you have to say about switching domains and how that effects your serps over time… what happens right away and how that rolls out over the course of a week or month(s).
On a more personal note, when you out in Phoenix next? We’ve got Az Entrepreneur Conference and Geek Week with PodCampAz and another Ignite all in one shot in early November. That sounded pitchy… haha… anyways it’d be cool to talk search with ya. I saw you on the stairs at SXSW and yelled “Hey Matt” atcha but I was already late for a meeting so had to run but next time I promise I’ll actually introduce myself
I think you more than enough links on your blog. Way over the 100 links per page you yourself and Google recommend.
BTW, it would nice if you would prevent further posts BEFORE you back up your database when you are moving
Matt,
Please turn on full feed. Somewhere during the migration, your feed has become partial feed and it is very difficult to read in Google Reader.
301 redirect functioning very well, at least from Denmark
Matt is here.
Dave (THE original) is here too
Awaiting for MWA to arrive.
Otherwise we are back to business as usual on the good old dynamic mattcutts.com
Congrats, Matt!
I’m not
welcome back Matt.. guess, you have some nice time off blog.. Would like to read about ur experience in moving the domain back..
How does this transition effect your google ranking?
look forward to that posting – will be doing the same shortly.
Testing comments – works great!
RSS links are not working.
http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/8tO6sKc2XiY/
It would be interesting to read your experiences about shifting your domain, and back. I was really surprised where Google search results for your name were directing to dullest.com! Good to know you are back.
Hello Matt,
Its nice to see you back in your own site but what about the theme you are using ?
I actually liked your old blog theme very much. This new one looks sad and un-cool.
Are you going to switch back to the old theme?
Regards
i know this isn’t the ideal place but i thought you could pass a basic request/suggestion along (as you have done on occasion in the past)
the gmail loading page should really have a link to ‘sign out’ or ‘switch user’ — it’s a real pain to have to wait till gmail loads before being able to log out and log in as yourself ..
anyways, if it’s a known issue n/m but if no one has complained to the gmail team i would appreciate you dropping them a word — if this is just an annoying comment, please accept my apologies and ignore me
yitz..
I am very amused about your redirect experiment. Looking forward to read about your thoughts.
Matt,
You are awesome. I would love to hear the conclusions you have drawn from this.
one thing is for certain people will follow critical content anywhere =)
thanks,
Guy
Why continue to maintain the splash page at http://www.mattcutts.com when you have an ‘About Me’ page under your /blog/ directory? Seems kinda odd. Shouldn’t you just 301 from the splash page into /blog/ or just move your blog to the root? Very easily done.
Interested to hear what your comments on the move will be…
I think this theme is clean and simple (easy on the eyes). But that’s my view.
Matt,
Thanks for your work. I just wanted to point out that I just moticed that the rss feed I have for you on my site stopped working.
@ypex on twitter
Welcome back and looking forward to hear you on your findings..not sure what makes you too like this hyped theme…Yeah it looks clean and simple but there are themes better than this…
Roshan Joshi, it was all intentional. I wanted to try a new webhost (Tiger Technologies) and see how they held up under a digging load before I committed to them. I liked my previous webhost (Pair)–except when Digg traffic came slamming around.
Along the way, it also seemed like a good idea to try a new WordPress theme (Thesis), and also to see how Google treated 302s and 301s.
Chuck Reynolds, no Phoenix plans right now, but if you see me anytime soon, definitely stop to chat!
Bibokz, I still want to give it a few days to see how my rankings change coming *back* to mattcutts.com, but the short answer is that my rankings didn’t suffer much at all (and no, I didn’t do anything special for my site).
angilina, my previous theme (Almost Spring, by Beccary) is so old that no one seems to know where Beccary is anymore. I have to admit that I was tired it. I may change the theme going forward, but I probably won’t go back to my old theme.
yitz, I’ll try to pay attention myself. In my experience, the loading page doesn’t take that long before it shows up. You are using Chrome, right?
Mark Stanley, excellent question. Mainly I’m playing it safe in case I want to add some new content besides just a blog. I completely agree that my root page is pretty sucky though. SEO-wise, I think it does attract a few more links keeping the root page separate from the main blog page.
Rajesh, if you’ve seen themes that you like better, definitely let me know!
Matt,
Care to elaborate more on this one. thanks a lot.
“SEO-wise, I think it does attract a few more links keeping the root page separate from the main blog page.”
Welcome back to the original domain. Honestly the change seemed a crazy thing for me… Anyway, we are waiting that post about what you learned.
Test-1: Testing now using IE
Comment form isn’t saving name and e-mail in FF
Good- IE is saving name and e-mail.
Only in FF the form isn’t saving the name and e-mail after submitting a comment.
Sorry for inconvenience, Matt. be kind to delete. Much appreciated.
Matt — I am in the process of doing the same thing with my WP blog — new theme (yep, Thesis), new domain (except in my case I am going from a bad domain name to a good one
). Also I am partly interested in what will happen to traffic, SERPs, etc., just cuz it’s interesting.
Because I am changing a significant number of things, it’ll be interesting to see how Google and other SEs respond. I want to “just switch”, but there are a lot of things like titles, meta-desc, new treatment of categories, etc. that I am not sure are the same or close enough yet.
WordPress doesn’t exactly make moving domains transparent — the full protocol and domain is saved in several places throughout the database, and all my efforts to do local URLs without seem to have been overridden by WP. Also, there’s really not a very good single place I have found that provides broader migration steps. I also had some encoding issues in cases where I had copy/pasted some text containing curly quotes, etc … which seems wrong, since the new DB was a direct backup from the old one (and used all the same encodings, collation, etc.). It’s not exactly a matter of pressing a few buttons.
I am not overly thrilled with Thesis, but at least it’s different than my old one which was early 2.x era. I guess it’s good for folks who don’t know CSS and want some flexibility, and fairly neat layout options. But I will end up doing custom PHP pages to get at what I need, I think. Seems like it needs a couple more rounds of updates to make it more powerful.
But I am learning more stuff, and that’s only a good thing.
Can you please respond to the urgent email I sent you?
Also my link when I post on your Blog has not worked properly for over a year now.
Hi Matt,
I have a question about redirection. I have a site in geocities that is well ranked in google. The problem is that geocities is closing later this year and they dont allow 301 redirects. Whats the solution to move a website from geocities to another host without loosing google rankings? In this case a meta refresh with content=0 , would work for redirecting the site and transferring ranks in google? Google would consider this meta refresh like a 301 redirect? If not, what other options do i have to move my site to another server and, redirect it without loosing google ranking?
Thanks
Thanks, Valter
Matt,
Looking forward to the data. Too bad you couldn’t have run it as an A/B test somehow, I keep reading about those but I’m way too lazy to ever conduct one. If you want to compare your travels to a blog that never goes anywhere, mine hasn’t budged since 2005.
Also noticed a few people commented about your feed. Just a couple weeks ago, I turned my feed off because I got sick of seeing over 5,000 false reads in my site stats every day, big waste of bandwidth. Never figured out if it was bots or people who set their readers to check for a new post way too frequently, but it’s been an interesting experiment in terms of finding out how many of my subscribers actually read the feed, as measured by those who now click through to the actual post.
Not many:-)
Morris
Matt,
I should have written, “turned my full feed off” so all it consists of now is the last three linked blog titles and a sentence for each.
Morris
Matt, in the states the page loads very quickly, i’m sure, (the first time I saw google maps in the states I was like, hey wait, it’s instantaneous for you guys!, i see gray areas that take time to load usually) but i’m in Israel, on a 5mb connection and it still takes long enough that the lack of the link to logout _before_ the page has taken the time to load is really annoying.. It’s also not a problem for someone who doesn’t share a computer with someone else. When you crack open your laptop and open gmail, and it logs in to the wrong account (sso) everytime, and you need to wait till it loads before you can hit log out and then sit through the whole load page all over again..
well, you get the idea.
(I just popped into firebug (and enabled it for a second, i’ll disable it again i promise) it takes more than 20 seconds of ‘firebug time’ (in the net tab) for me to get past the loading page and see my inbox.. maybe 50% of that time is firebug slowing gmail down, (if you say so) but the other ~10 seconds are what I actually experience a lot of the time. i’m on a slower connection right now than my normal connection, but still it’s not _that_ slow for the rest of my web use.)
And in answer to your question, at work I’m in chrome 99.9% of the time, but @ home on my mac, alas, i’m without recourse.
Welcome back to your old domain name Matt.
I know disclosure and privacy are very important when it comes to blogging. Deciding on your sites policies content is obviously also important when it comes to letting your readers understand your intentions with your site.
You said you were trying to decide on whether to place a link to your disclosure policy on the side or the top. Is this a matter of personal taste or are you looking at your placement from a SEO perspective?
Any how, I look forward to your findings on moving to a new domain for a month. We all appreciate you time and effort in doing research like this, you have probably added many years to many peoples lives by reducing peoples stress about topics such as this!
Matt,
Checked dullest.com vs mattcutts.com on the various traffic trends sites. Alexa is the only one that dealt with the change correctly. Google Trends and Quantcast show nothing for dullest due to the 1 month time lag, and Compete shows some straight line slope for dullest, traffic ramping straight up. I actually knew a VC (through a colleague) who swore by Compete, might be a good time to sell him the domain:-)
Morris
Tom Forrest, I just emailed you back with specific pages and example links from your site. The reason why the “my link when I post on your Blog has not worked properly for over a year now” is because you’re entering a ‘@’ as part of your URL when you leave comments. Double-check the info that you’re filling out (specifically the URL field) when you’re leaving a comment.
yitz, I thought it might be something like that. I remember google.com taking 12 seconds to load at my inlaws’ house in Omaha a few years ago. I’ll pass on the suggestion.
would have been an interesting to test doing this and pysicaly hosting outside the USA I have endless problems with 1and1 even with .co.uk domains.
Sorry my mistake regarding your blog. It filled that stuff in automatically, e.g website, I guess from an old mistake of mine.
I do not understand why people like Twitter so much, I just do not get it.
Just one question, does your experience correlate with how Google states they treat 301′s and 302′s?
It looks like the blogroll with a link to my site is missing, heeh, hope you get that back up soon (wave of hand) but so far the rest looks good..
I would be waiting to read about your learning as my company is planning to move a website (subdomain) to a new domain and the management wants to know how much traffic would we loose by this move.
Hi Matt,
I did a G Search for Google Seo a few days back and dullest.com was there in the top, but now its gone and even mattcutts.com is not there in the results. Why is it so?
The Google SERP’s are dynamic, not static. Also, there are multiple data centers and Matt’s redirects, along with multiple other possibilities.
Prathik
I think there is some algo updates uderway. Matt said once something like: Summer is a good time to test new things. Expect more changes to be noticed on Google serps during June and July
It’s not June or July yet.
Sweeeeeet. I look forward to seeing some G.A on this…?
Would love to hear the best way to change domains because I’m trying to do it but very concerned about loosing links/pagerank.
Should we all try a move sometime soon? Perhaps a nice document on just how to do this without loosing that all important Google juice ? Thanks Dan
Matt, one more thing:
Can you use some kind of: Email Notification Comment Plugin ?
I have to visit old posts, in order to see if you or any other person replied to my comment or not.
Can you add a feature via which, if someone reply to our comment, we get a email notification about it?
I like your exprement, but in our company we are not exprementing like you
we are creating new domain names to target different countries in the English speaking world. We we are afraid of is the duplicate content issue. Is moving from old domain to new domains to target specific countries concidered as duplicate content or it is ok as long as we are targeting different regions.
Nice seeing that you aren’t cheating and you now have a PR 0 page after all the redirects!
Hi Matt
I have a analytics question that you might be able to point me in the right direction.
Our site is a directory model, the companies on there would have several different products listed, pdf’s, and press releases.
To do the analytics for a client I have to track down each page and then run the report in analytics and pdf it.
Any ideas on how to automate this in some fashion would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Craig
Matt,
You’ve got some white space in the bottom. Put the disclaimer link there (right under where it says “Previous post” on this page. It’s consistent with where a lot of sites put their legal stuff, and it’s also unobtrusive. Most of the users here are tech-savvy anyway, so they should at least have the sense to know that.
Just a thought.
I think any disclaimer should be above the fold as most readers are lurkers and will never reach the very bottom of the page. How about another tab at the top along with the other 3? Or, replace the duplicate Subscribe link at the very top right.
Matt, I’ve been trialling the same with one of my sites and have just moved it back to the original domain. How long do you anticipate until the SERPs are displaying the original (switched to) domain again?
Thanx and congrates!!!
I see MWA has arrived. That makes me and Dave (original) very happy, indeed
IMO, Disclaimer, should be on top beside: HOME-ABOUT ME- GOOGLE/SEO
Matt,
Just curious, why use WordPress and not your company’s product, Blogger?
But Matt, this is just a little blog!
Some folks are 301-redirecting enormous, complex websites that are their economic lifeblood supporting a bunch of employees. So can you really generalize from this experience?
Regardless, eagerly awaiting your notes.
- Andrew
I asked him a similar question once before, Brent. The short version of the answer is that he hosts and maintains full control over the site.
Brent, I believe Matt wanted complete seperation from Google on his personal Blog. There are likey hidden agendas, but we’ll never know
Ok in response to myself, your old domain is now back in the SERPs. Search for “Matt cutts” and you’ve got mattcutts.com/blog ranking first (cache date of 27/05) followed by dullest.com/blog ranking next (cache date of 23/05). And both with a further indented listing.
So the two sets of URLs are temporarily dominating the top positions
Finally a 301 experiment I can follow in real time. I really want to see how this works out!
Hi Matt, not sure if this is the best place to ask but I’m happy to hear from your commenters as well as yourself, so makes sense to post here I guess!
With regards to SEO, there’s a lot of link “hives” as such on the net, with some people primarily using these to bump up their SERP rankings. Whilst I don’t believe that everyone using this method is trying to purposely use ‘underhand’ methods, it does seem to be a good way for scammers, spammers and the like to get their site ranked rather than providing quality and relevant content that is then recognised by a larger community and linked legitimately. What is your opinion on this? Does the ‘black hat’ method of just using pure human hours to get as many, imo, “low quality” links as possible have a future in SEO or is/should there be a crackdown on this style of SEO implementation ?
I’d be interested to know how you all felt.
Just now was seeing the BlogRolls at Google Official Blog and saw Mattcutts.com out there. I got the news that it has been moved to Dullest.com, Nice surprise again!
Good to see you back at Mattcutts.com
Between I see Dullest.com still in Google index and with more than 300 backlinks (link:dullest.com), It will be great to have your views and to keep note of what we guys need to do if ever we try to switch from one domain to other. It must be painful activity doing so
, Offcourse lot more than 301- redirects.
I am glad to see you’re back at MattCutts.com, and I eagerly await your post about your experience moving the site and domain around.
Duplicate Content
Hi Matt !
I think an ordinary website couldn’t get same results on a similar test
Today’s update is dullest.com now outranking mattcutts.com. Googlebot trying to make up its mind…
Hello Matts
Welcome back. Is it that easy for all to switch between domains? Say if I want to move my blog from blogspot to my main site…….will I loose its PR? What factors do I need to keep in mind? Above all could you please tell me how to do that? One more question if a site is giving its link to its blog how much link juice it is passing to it? And because of that only 1 link can blog gain good PR?
I appologise for asking you these questions here but didn’t know how to contact you…..i mean your email id I didn’t have.
Can’t wait to hear your thoughts on the transition and then back – thanks as always Matt, great stuff.
-Swansonager
Matt,
I’m very interested in this subject. We’re strongly considering moving the domain of the nonprofit whose website I run from acus.org to atlanticcouncil.org because of a rebranding effort. The problem is that the old URL dates from 1994, has a PageRank 6, and is spidered very quickly by Google. We’d really hate to be penalized and invisible to Google, which accounts for a fair share of our traffic.
Test.
LOL @ the duplicate content comment!
It’s interesting how both sites are currently ranking for the same terms, I assume this is because the 301 redirect has not been picked up from dullest.com just yet. But even if this is the case; I’d only expect one domain to rank for competitive terms because surely this is duplicate content?
Here’s a screenshot for a query on “SEO Blog” in Google UK, notice how mattcutts.com and dullest.com are ranking alongside each other:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevgibbo/3577267368/
A Google UK query for “Matt Cutts” is currently showing dullest.com at #1&2 with mattcutts.com at #3&4. Looking forward hearing about your findings during this experiment.
Seems like it went relatively smooth, super interesting… I have always been concerned about moving entire domains. Did Yahoo & MSN respond as fast as the GOOG?
James, acus.org is MUCH better than atlanticcouncil.org. Surely you can rebrand WITHOUT changing Domains?
Hi Matt cutts
Is good that you are back
I am inform that now is a virus call
Gumblar.cn
Now that virus is making to delete the google ads in the associated users i mean adsense program.
I has clean That Infected Files But goes Back
Before What this virus maked was to delete all my google ads that was made using frames.
I tell all the webmasters To be beware About This.
I Hope matt cutts as a google workers could give us a solution .
Cause now google is losing more money than adsense users.
The Posible Solution u can find here
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pandoraz.com.ar%2Fseguridad%2Fnueva-infeccion-virus-gumblarcnexploit%2F&sl=es&tl=en&hl=ES&ie=UTF-8
But sometime Doesn’t Work.
If You are a spanish speaker Find here
http://www.pandoraz.com.ar/seguridad/nueva-infeccion-virus-gumblarcnexploit/
Sometime This file works But sometimes no
The malstrom Webmasters is using it
Take a look in the root ini.php file
http://www.malstrom.com.ar/php.ini
Pd:
I am a not a english speaker.
I loose Like 90000 google ads Impresion In a day.
Now the site is alive But i have to clean
Hi Matt! You said you tested the 301s and 302s effects on Google so what’s the findings? Is it possible for you to share it with us? By the way, nice to be back with the original domain. I was really shocked when the dullest.com came out instead of the original URL. I thought somebody already replaced you.
Hey Matt. Welcome back.
Looking forward to more interesting Google / SEO content streaming from here again
Regards,
Arnold
I’m looking forward to what you have to say on the move and the issues a lot of us face when making changes.
Onto something else I must say I’m waiting for your comments on bing
Dave, thanks for the comment. The current domain has the advantage of being much easier to type. The problem is that the rebrand is from “The Atlantic Council of the United States” to simply “Atlantic Council.” At some point in the not-too-distant future, acus.org would be nonsensical. Or no?
Hi..
U had chosen a very good way to express the points it took my 10 mins to read all the 50 points i mean to give a look on them well u had mentioned all the points , do have any more or new and effective about SEO if yes do reply me .
Hey i too would like to read your comments on BING!!!!! What are your predictions or calculations bout it? I read it somewhere that it is “old wine in new bottle” means bing is more of like live search. How many points you would like to award it on a scale of 10?
I would retain the acronym Domain and change its meaning to something like “Atlantic Council Of Users All”. Perhaps and corny example, but you get the idea?
Hi Matt, I know that what I’m going to say it’s a little bit off-topic… but anyway, I saw your comment on Scott Heiferman’s Notes (it was about comparisons between google and meetup). I wanted to leave him a message, but the dude doesn’t allow messages unless you register with typepad, twitter or the like. So I was wondering, please could you tell him to let ANYONE leave their messages?? It’s not very democratic like that
Besides, he could make an exception, I’m typing from Italy. (If he doesn’t know, please tell him that the Meetup Master, creator, inventor etc. put the link to his funny google/meetup page on his site, so he might get messages from Italy, if he doesn’t mind about that, of course.)
Have a great day!
Silvia
Did your brief move have anything to do with testing the “Change of Address” feature in Webmaster Tools?.. just saw it in my account then the link disappeared.