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!

148 Responses to Switching things around (Leave a comment)

  1. Do comments work? Yup, looks like they do.

  2. First comment on t3h new site. W000000t!

  3. Nice experiment, i’m curious about your rankings. Let us know the results!

  4. Welcome back on your new domain!

  5. I like the new look – looks great! Keep up the great work, I love following the information that you extend to all of us!

  6. This weekend I cleaned up my garden. Weekends are great for doing stuff. And now I have a herb garden!

  7. testing comments. yes they work Matt!

  8. Hey Matt

    The new template color is cool. You haven’t mentioned what would you do if you don’t like what you see πŸ™‚

  9. Hello Mr. Cutts,
    Everything seems perfect! I will take into consideration using 302s maybe some time in the future. How much time did it take you to do all of it? And responding to your last question, yes… comments work perfectly πŸ˜‰

  10. Looking good! I think you’ll like the Thesis platform. It’s amazingly powerful, and Chris Pearson is blowing it out of the water with near constant innovations.

  11. The question of course becomes … Is it really you? I’ll check your ‘old’ blog for an answer …

  12. Hey Matt,

    Thesis is quite cool – just changed my blogs design to one based on thesis, too. One Question: Why do you do temporary (302) redirects instead of permantens (301)? Are you planning to move back to the old domain soon?

  13. Trying to build the PR on this domain so you can sell it, Matt? πŸ˜‰

  14. Can we get the story of why you purchased Dullest.com?

  15. Charlie Anzman

    Yes its Matt himself doing all this. He posted a message about it on Twitter!

  16. Frank, I may move back to mattcutts.com soon, which is why I stuck with 302s.

    I like the new look – looks great!

    Honestly, I spend 90% of the time on the infrastructure and only a tiny bit of time on the design, but thanks!

    Dave, in order to understand the SEO side of domaining, I was looking at expired domains a few years ago. I saw dullest.com come down the pipe and figured it might be fun to have.

  17. I think you are trying to experiment something πŸ™‚

  18. So… is Thesis really worth the $87 they’re asking for it?

  19. The perception of the site has now changed!! Ive always associated mattcutts.com with the colour of baby vomit πŸ™

    seriously though.. love the blue πŸ™‚

  20. Nice move Matt and a very useful experiment. I am sure the insights you get will help you in discovering some of the problems folks face and build a cure for those.

    I will be anxious to read about your findings.

    Arun

  21. Hey Matt,

    Good luck with the move. It’s refreshing to hear that the ‘legendary’ Matt Cutts is also just another Blogger who has the same website logistical challenges as the rest of us!

    I like the new light-blue background. It’s got a calming effect πŸ˜‰

    Anthony.

  22. So trying to mix things up on dullest.com? Good idea, but you ruined the name πŸ˜‰

  23. Large images on the front page overlap the right menu on FF3 here. But I like the new design.

  24. What’s up with Thesis being from Almost Spring and going to a link to do with “beccary”? I think the word you might be looking for is DIYthemes, unless it’s a thesis skin, but even then, couldn’t see that on the link.

  25. Well, the new design takes some getting used to. I have only 2 things to say –

    1. The new design looks good. But, it is so frightfully different than the old, I dare say the Matt Cutts personality that was associated with it has got a bit diluted.
    2. Dullest doesn’t ring anything to my mind, apart from it being true to its name (which of course is not) or some quip. But Mattcutts.com was what it actually is, your own ‘fiefdom’, and I would rather it stayed that way.

    Best luck Matt

  26. Matt

    I know design isn’t really your focus, but a couple of thesis features you should really check out.

    1. Add Google Custom Search instead of the default search.
    2. two columns of widgets (I know, not a Thesis thing, per se), especially given the length of you list of categories.

    Finally, I know you can’t accept gifts and all, but I am sure some designer out there would be happy to spend a few hours to give you a great look and feel without breaking your budget.

  27. Matt

    Btw, where is the CAPTCHA? πŸ™‚

  28. Why shud u ever be worried about SE rankings? πŸ˜‰ Nice experiment though. Keep us posted.

  29. Ah the things geeks do for fun on a weekend.
    Is there anything better than messing with DNS!?

  30. kristarella, my old layout was “Almost Spring” but that website doesn’t even appear to be up any more. I linked to a post about that because it was the most useful thing to do. My new layout is Thesis, which I really like–even though there’s still a few things I’d tweak.

    McMohan, I plan to move back to mattcutts.com eventually; dullest.com is just a nice place to hang my hat while I try out all this new technology and a new webhost. If I like TigerTech, I’ll move mattcutts.com over and move back to mattcutts.com.

    Jonah Stein, agreed that I should do the CSE. I like having 720 pixels in my main content for larger images though, and that limits my other column width.

    Harith, I haven’t had the math CAPTCHA for a while now. πŸ™‚

    Midhun, exactly. πŸ™‚

  31. decoder, I also installed the final version of Ubuntu 9.04 on a couple computers this weekend. It is *slick*. Very fast and nice and polished. So yeah, pretty much a complete geek-out weekend. I even cleaned up my desktop icons on my laptop.

  32. P.S. Wow, less than an hour and Google’s already found a double-digit number of blog posts on dullest.com. That’s cool.

  33. Nice experiment and nice design.

    Great work Matt!

  34. I like the new look! It’s really cool and it’s working fine!!

  35. Dave (Original)

    Well, your blog does have at least PR7 and you are “Matt Cutts” from Google, so you can stop acting surprised at the speed of which googlebot found posts on your new Domain.

  36. Let us know if you need some SEO tips for Thesis… kidding. Nice change Matt, huge bump in looks and readability.

  37. Matt, great design and a very a clean look.

    I believe you might’ve intentionally left the “WordPress Admin” link on bottom, to see how many folks will bite the bait (I was one of them) :).

    It would be fun to see how many people clicked that through Analytics.

  38. How do you know what text is links when some links are blue?

  39. Matt – Im interested in what prompted this move? I realis your saying you like to mix things up every now and then, but is there any specific thing you are looking to track in this move?

    thanks!

    Martin

  40. Like the new theme – anyone would think you were making moves to leave google and set up your own business @ dullest.com :p

  41. No-one really comes here for the design, so I’d not worry too much about it (and I’m sure you won’t be). I’ve heard a lot of great things about Thesis. One thing I’d like sorted, though, is the site width. Horizontal scrolling ain’t great.

    I hope whatever you’re aiming for works out well, Matt.

  42. welcome to the club

  43. I am interested to see how it does affect your rankings. You are showing 0 pr. YOu just did what most of us are scared to death to do- I will be watching with my mouth open catching flies and what could be business suicide for the average internet sigte.

  44. Philippe Meunier

    Hi Matt, will the RSS feed of rour old domain still continue to work in Google Reader with a 302 redirect ?

  45. Matt,

    Looks good. I like that you’ve kept an appearance that keeps the focus on content. Nice layout.

    I’ve been using Thesis and Tiger Technologies for about a year and am tremendously satisfied with both. The Tiger Tech folks give absolutely top-notch support, and Chris Pearson does, too.

    Looking forward to your writeup of any lessons you learn in this massive change out. Good luck.

  46. It looks much better! I like the blue a lot better than the green you had.

    I am interested in your SERP stats from this 302 change. Hopefully you will create a post with the results.

  47. Matt…yes, I too would like to know what the results were in regards to the serp changes…
    my own guess is that they will perhaps “wave” slightly, but then return back to the current rankings…

    πŸ™‚

    Jim

  48. Matt, when you say “I changed my blog layout to the excellent Thesis theme from Almost Spring” it does seem like the Thesis theme was done by “Almost Spring” for the uninvolved.

    Perhaps changing it to “I changed my previous blog layout Almost Spring to the excellent Thesis theme” would eliminate the thoughts and comments, such as “Bah, everyone knows that Thesis was done by Chris Pearson”.

    Looks awesome, btw.

  49. Hey Matt,

    I know I might be the only one who cares about this, but it would be cool to see at least some piece of the “branding” of the former site carry over to this one–even if it’s just pulling in the same green color into the sidebar or background somewhere…or maybe you got tired of green?

  50. Krista, it’s a little confusing the way it’s phrased, but I think Matt is saying he switched “to Thesis *away* from Almost Spring…”

    I’m just glad he’s using Thesis. πŸ™‚

  51. What kind of content did you have on your dullest.com domain before?

  52. Hey Matt, looks good. Keep the SEO articles and relative tweets coming…Matt Cutts.com has always been the first place I go to research an issue.

  53. Matt – you have a ‘Nofollow’ on your Home button

    Did you place this or does it come standard with your Thesis theme?

    Either way …would you recommend it..

    thanks
    NC_SEO (twitter)

  54. Matt how did you move the database when wp gets big it can be fun trying to use hobby programer tools like PHPmyadmin.

    We had loads of fun migrateing a single user wp install from a site that gets .75 M page views to MU wordpress especialy when you dont have propper ssh access to the cli to run grown up tools such as they are for MySQL. I had to wrote my first shell script program in what must be 15 years.

  55. I’ve always wondered about migrating SEO traffic when one website X acquires website Y and then proceeds to integrate all of website Y’s content into X, with 301 redirects from Y to X. It would be great to see a blog post of how Google handles this switchover.

    I would assume you should be able to maintain at least 90% of the traffic, as in real life if company X acquires Y and all things being equal the organic customers continue coming for the product not the company.

  56. @Colin C: The wayback machine has been surprisingly empty the past few years (robots.txt perhaps?), but something tells me this was from before he got the domain. πŸ™‚ http://web.archive.org/web/20021001081617/www.dullest.com

  57. Folks!

    I see some comments showing the avatar of the commenter. How do you do that?

  58. Hi Matt, Very cool layout, but I miss the old color scheme and personally I think you should keep your blog on your old domain as it is your blog (there is nothing dull here! :o) LOL!

  59. Matt, where do you recomend as a good place to learn how to do all the things that you did here?

  60. Well Matt, you know what that calls for right? Selling me mattcutts.com for 2-fiddy!

    No? Then how about that extra kidney you got? Three-fiddy?

  61. Wow, I’m really shocked you changed…

    It seems strange to move away from your personal brand…

  62. PS. When I made the move from hm2k.org (cutenews powered) to hm2k.com (wordpress powered) that wasn’t fun… Hope it goes smoother for you…

  63. The 302 redirect makes me believe that you have other plans for mattcutts.com/blog/… but perhaps I’m wrong.

    Still I am curious, why dullest?

  64. Harith, search for gravitar. It got bought by WordPress/Automattic recently.

  65. i quite like reading the comments ..

    would be nice if i didn’t have to scroll through pages

    but apart from that, i prefer this look to the old one. very clean and professional

  66. Matt,
    FYI

    Clicking the WordPress Admin link at the bottom of the page gives me an error:
    http://www.dullest.com/blog/wp-admin/

    Jeff

  67. I had switched to Thesis already and will never look back! I also move from Dreamhost to Media Temple a couple of days ago and shared this experience on my blog. For those who are going to make a similar move, I hope this helps: http://tr.im/jway

  68. Thanks, Matt

    I went to gravatar to sign up. Harith wasn’t available. Can you imagine? And I thought only my parents (God rest their souls) would call their son a name like that πŸ™‚

  69. damian, agreed. I’ll see if I can get all the comments on one page. Harith, you may need to update your personal brand to include your last name. πŸ™‚

    MΓ‘rio Andrade, I had the domain name dullest.com sitting around and not doing anything with it. I plan on moving back to mattcutts.com eventually, so we’ll see how moving back works too.

  70. Ah, all the comments are back on one page. Thanks for giving the blog a good workout, everyone. πŸ™‚

  71. Harith, signing up at gravatar, you use your email address to register, it’s nothing to do with your name….

  72. Brian Clark, the wording is a little awkward, but I wanted to put the Thesis link ahead of the mention of the (almost defunct) Almost Spring theme.

  73. Jeff Bhavnanie, that link works fine for me, which is all that matters. πŸ™‚ I put a .htaccess file on wp-admin that allows only certain IP addresses to access that directory. It’s an extra security measure to prevent against hacking.

    See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/three-tips-to-protect-your-wordpress-installation/ for more info.

  74. Maurice, I did a mysqldump to save off the .sql file, scp’ed it to the new webhost, then piped it into the database with mysql. Then I used phpMyAdmin to edit the siteurl and home values in wp_options. After that, I went to dullest.com/blog/wp-admin/ to upgrade the database and things worked pretty well from there.

  75. Robert Enriquez, thanks for pointing that out. I removed the nofollow on the link to my home page.

    Colin C., dullest.com was essentially an empty page for the last few years. I did a trial runthrough a few weeks ago, so dullest.com/blog/ was working before this.

  76. David Mihm, I’m pretty tired of green. πŸ™‚

  77. Matt

    Given that Google has indexed 12 pages already that are on MattCutts.com, aren’t you creating a duplicate content issue?

  78. MOGmartin, I wanted to see what would happen with traffic and duplicate content, with my site as guinea pig. And I really needed to update my template and blog version.

  79. Hi Matt,
    So, basically you are trying to figure how your algorithm works smooth with “website theme/design” changes? I’m a strong supporter of regular design changes and all my hopes are that it works 100%. It will be very sad to know that changing the look for special occasions or just to boost sales will not hurt search engine rankings.
    Now it makes me wonder if you guys do track theme changes (as in wordpress for example) and if changing it often (around once a month) is good or bad. Is there difference is CSS and HTML updates/changes. I found the AdSense/Words (I think) “thing” browsing some pages and was wondering if you’re testdriving visual presentation as parameter?

    BTW: I like your theme. Simplicity! well I also like mine on Venetsian.com wordpress blog.

    Cheers,
    Venetsian.

  80. Matt – you may want to put a nofollow on all the gravatar links even though I would enjoy a backlink from your site πŸ™‚

  81. Hello Matt,

    As I opened your blog and watched it redirect to this site, I actually smiled a bit and saying in heart that, at last, someone was able to hack Matt Cutts blog πŸ™‚

    Then I thought may be its some kind of a joke, but realized that, the date is not 1st April.

    Matt, you can play around with your site/blog, but people who care a lot about SERPs, for them doing such thing is like a nightmare πŸ™‚

    Good luck with your fun experiments
    Regards

  82. Matt

    A minor issue. The [title] of both http://dullest.com/ and http://www.dullest.com/ is still www dot mattcutts dot com πŸ™‚

  83. Great new look and feel. Looking forward to hearing how this major switch impacts your site traffic, etc.

  84. Robert Enriquez, I believe the gravatar links do have nofollow. The relevant part of the code looks like this:

    <a href=”http://centuryhouse.net/” rel=”external nofollow”><img alt=” src=’http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/5e1788073d730dbdd0c4f8ac4601e88a?s=44&d=identicon&r=G’ class=’avatar avatar-44 photo’ height=’44’ width=’44’ /></a>

    so the rel attribute is “external nofollow”. Google handles that case correctly (spaces are specified as a separator). If you don’t see those links as nofollow, I suspect that it’s an issue in whatever extension or Greasemonkey you use to spot nofollow links.

  85. I like the new blue theme and the layout. But the domain name doesn’t suit.

  86. Suggestion and a question.

    Suggestion: your search requires a Javascript (the old one didn’t, IIRC.) If you could put a “Go” button in or something, that’d be fantastical.

    Question: how are you measuring the impact on your search traffic, given that we’re going into a period (i.e. Western world spring/summer) where web traffic in general goes down? Are you doing a year-over-year relative measure, or how are you handling it?

  87. Sorry, Matt, one more thing…you may want to adjust the template for code validation reasons.

    W3 validator results

    I’m done now. Honest.

  88. Its not a big deal to me if Matt wants to stay here on dullest.com or back to his old mattcutts.com coz I am subscribed to his feed πŸ™‚

  89. yea i’m using SEO for Firefox…i checked the source code after I posted…I couldn’t take back or edit my post πŸ™‚

  90. What are planning to do with your mattcutts.com?

  91. Dave (Original)

    You could always sell your old Domain to PR junkies and make a small fortune. Sadly, most existing Domain prices are based on the home page PR. Like they say, there’s a sucker born every minute.

  92. So funny with the new domain!

    Now I have to go see how hi my site ranks for matt cutts!

    Much Love,
    dk

  93. Good job Matt on changing up the theme on your blog. Now, all you need in Facebook connect and you’re set πŸ™‚

    Shawn

  94. @Matt retransfering WordPress

    so your tables where under the 2M limit ? or did you have have to use the mysqldump –skip-opt

  95. Looking good, Matt. These are the types of changes that appear a little daunting to me. It’s cool to see folks like you just whizzing through the changes like it’s no one’s business. Nice work.

  96. When I clicked through from Google Reader, I thought mattcutts.com had been hacked – then I read the post and realised that it was business as usual. Nothing like changing it up to keep everyone on their toes!

  97. Hi Matt,

    I was in a shock when I typed MattCutts.com and it took me dullest.com … I thought your domain/website has been hacked πŸ˜‰

    Anyway, new look is simple and works fine. But I’m noticing many SEO bloggers are changing their theme to Thesis theme.

    Though it’s a premium theme, but I guess you got it for free!

  98. Don’t you think that adding a nofollow on the “home” button of a blog will be interesting (less google juice leaking on every single page of a site)..? I actually stumbled upon quite a few posts/articles that started to think it would be better to have a link to the homepage on the footer (or elsewhere) with an optimized anchor txt and a nofollow on the default “home” button? I saw the nofollow you had on your HOME button and I thought it was intentional..

  99. himynameis john

    Ohhh, less than an hour ago I got an email from matt@dullest.com asking if I’d drop a paid link on to my website for dullest.com. I naturally said, “no probl..errrr” haha… of course, I’m joking and making up this ENTIRE scenario.

    Askmen.com is naffing me off though, they always pester me for links… which I personally perceive as being worse than paid links… they have a certain amount of cunningness about it which I do not like, but doesn’t appear to break any SE TCs.

    PS; Thesis is just pure joy and worth every cent – cut my bounce rates a treat!

  100. Maurice, I didn’t do any skip-opt stuff. I hope the database made it through okay, but I think it did. I killed all Akismet-ish spam and then dumped the database and it was ~46MB total.

    Bibokz, I need to see how Digg-proof TigerTech is. If it looks good, I may move mattcutts.com over to TigerTech and then move my main blog from dullest.com back to mattcutts.com.

    SEFL, I figure that year-over-year effects will be 2nd order compared to the blog posts I do. I set up a new Analytics channel for the new domain, so I’m just looking at the total number of visits on the old channel/domain vs. the new channel/domain. If search engines failed badly, then traffic would drop off at mattcutts.com and not come up on dullest.com. But it appears that traffic is showing up fine on the new domain.

  101. Glad to see you on wordpress Matt. Thesis is a well structured design. I think you can play with the background color and make it look more attracting though. I don’t like this shade of blue.

    Hopefully you like the changes with wordpress and you will stay πŸ™‚

  102. I caught when you and danny were throwing around the idea of migrating to Thesis, and i see that he took the jump earlier than you did, but none the less, I like it..

    What is your time period to change from 302 to 301 if you decide to switch permanently? Presumably within a certain period of time, no? as to not hurt future rankings..

  103. Welcome to the Thesis-side! And the TigerTech-side!

    Dullest.com, huh? Why do I suspect some ultra-secret Google we get 302s right test is going on πŸ™‚

  104. The new theme looks fresh and simple.

  105. Danny, my site makes the perfect guinea pig. I laughed when Greg Boser got everyone to link to mattcutts.com instead of http://www.mattcutts.com. He was trying to mess me up and cause duplicate content hijinks, but little did he know that I was the guinea pig for the www/non-www setting in the webmaster console. πŸ™‚

    youfoundjake, I need to do a little Digg torture testing. That’s the next step.

  106. Dave (Original)

    So you are Google’s willing Guinia Pig for all sorts of hidden agenda tests, despite claiming your blog is personal and has nothing to do with Google πŸ˜‰ What else are hiding, Matt? (rhetorical).

    If I didn’t know better, I would say there is a direct conflict of interest. πŸ™‚

  107. Good choice going with thesis. We are actually starting to us it as our primary CMS (yes I call it a CMS rather than just a theme) for all of our sites now. The hook system just makes it way too easy to take a new site from zero to hero in just a few quick steps. All the built in SEO goodies are a nice touch as well. Saves time tracking down additional plugins.

  108. Matt, once i thought this blog is clone of your blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog. But now found that some testing is in progress. I think something new is going to pop up sooner.
    Keep up the good stuff.

  109. Dullest? You call your self that, I don’t think so. Great theme, very refreshing..

  110. Hey Matt.
    I liked the old layout better.
    This will take getting used to.

    I did notice that your HTML is really short.
    Is a shorter HTML page better for rankings?

  111. Matt,
    Have you considered adding the YARPP plugin back in? Looks like would be good thing to do as part of the torture testing. Or have you have decided that the plugin has no real page view (or other benefits) based on your experience?

    I’d be very interested in knowing your thoughts on it and how it well it performs on a high-traffic site on Tiger.

  112. Maybe I would add other Thesis features… but if you like your plain and minimalist design, I guess it is also very effective.

  113. Cool look. I just installed thesis for a client, thought I was on his site at first . LOL!

    Get the Thesis OpenHook plug-in, it rocks as well.

  114. With all the changes… I’ve got to ask.

    Are you using Super-Cache? Or is this all native install (wp-cache at most).

    And also though it looks clean, I have to go with the naysayers in that it does miss your… “tweaks”. That said, i expect an article write-up about this and perhaps a mention of it at WordCamp?

  115. Matt,

    Your new website seems very cool and user friendly especially color of the WordPress theme.

    Thanks

  116. It would be quite cool to see your Google Analytics search traffic graphs for before/during/after this change. Any chance of that in a follow-up post? πŸ™‚

  117. This new theme is somewhat “duller” (if not dullest =P) than the previous one, but it’s still cool πŸ™‚

    Can’t wait for you to share how these changes have affected your ranking, traffic, etc.

  118. We use the thesis theme as well and enjoy it. Yours is VERY clean and simple. It’s actually inspiring me to go clean up ours!

  119. Matt, I like the changes, but I’m pretty sure your blog used to be the first result for “matt cutts” in google and now its “mattcutts.com” – may just want to move this over to that domain

  120. I never saw Matt replying to so many comments in a single day! Maybe this blog will not be as its new domain suggests after all.

  121. *Sigh*

    I was sick to death of seeing this rotten Thesis theme 6 months ago, now it’s beyond ridiculous. The best thing i done after buying it was uninstall it, for the love of god matt don’t copy the monkeys.

  122. Matt,

    Any chance different hosts would be indexed faster than others? It appears site I host with godaddy get indexed faster than site I host with hostgator. Any thoughts? Or just an active imagination.

    Thanks for all the great information.

    Scott

  123. Dave (Original)

    “Matt Cutts” in Google now returns your main Domain and not your Blog at #1.

  124. I loooooove the Thesis theme. Makes life much easier and WP should make it a standard install.

  125. Very simple look for your new website, and thanks for the tips on 301 versus a 302.

  126. The new design looks good

  127. It’s nice to see a guy like you in the position your in to take time for people like us, thanks Matt.

  128. Matt,

    The theme is cool, and the site is loading pretty fast, comparing to older one. I feel there’s some room to add extra colors, as it’s white everywhere.

  129. As always Matt, Thank You. Your articles, comments and tips help the system work efficiently for everyone. Be well.

  130. Nice Theme !

    I saw google has indexed your new domain. So this time 302 redirect worked the same as 301 Redirect ?

  131. Well I guess this goes to prove that Google doesn’t really handle the 302 direct very well. If by nature it is supposed to know that it is temporary, then surely it should simply not index it?

    Duplicate issues anyone?
    When the site is no longer 302’ing to the new domain, these will all return 404 errors. At the end of the day this is no different from a 301?

    I think the real test here is how everything moved over with little fuss.

    But any reason to tinker is a good one πŸ™‚

  132. FYI: Maybe interesting to know/consider: Seems like pair Networks (~100ms) has a better ping time than TigerTech (~165ms) for me in Ireland.

  133. Hey Matt – have to say when I first saw the theme I thought it was a little plain, but I’ve just come back on my Aspire 1, and this theme is so much easier to use on a netbook! Good job.

    (BTW, also just upgraded the netbook to Ubuntu 9.04 – agree with you that it’s slick – although there isn’t a massive improvement from 8.10 except for the new notification system – can’t wait for 9.10, all the work their focusing on looks really cool – especially new theme for the desktop version and eucaliptus integration for the server version)

  134. 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 time 0 like would do the trick? Google would consider this meta refresh like a 301 redirect?

    Thanks, Valter

  135. Hi Matt,
    Frankly your old domain was better and was very popular. Onemore thing I am wondering is why did you choose wordpress instead of blogspot. Any technical reasons or layout and theming reasons?

  136. I don’t have enough time to read all the comments, and I’m sorry if someone already pointed this out and if you already answered to them πŸ™‚

    Matt…you said:

    >>redirects from one domain A.com to another domain B.com that are claimed to be temporary
    >>that is, content from B.com returned with an A.com url.

    And now my question is: “Y in the hell Google behaves exactly in the opposite way?”
    =>> http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=302+redirect+seo

    SEO advice: discussing 302 redirects
    seo black & white January 4, 2006 at 1:01 pm. Matt,. I see a possible problem with 302 on-site redirect. This is the case when the site we’re speaking about …
    http://www.dullest.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/

    Backlinks?? Blog’s strength?? Something else…..??

    Thx for your attention and sorry for my juniority πŸ™‚

    Clickz

  137. I preferred the old domain, although it’s always good to mix things up & experiment. I’d like to see an update on how things are tracking if you get some time!

  138. HI Matt,

    Looking forward to reading your results on how this affected you.

    Always keen to see possible side effects of a migration such as you have done.

  139. Hi Matt,

    So you were a beta tester for the new “Change of Address” tool in GWT ?

    πŸ˜‰

  140. Seriously dullest was like the dullest domain you could have chosen on the web !!!

  141. Its almost like spring cleaning isn’t it! Plus, it’s almost like someone was bored one morning when they woke up and decided, “hey! I think I will get up on the other side of the bed and then I will make tea instead of coffee, and they I know…I think I will change up on the web site today!” lol… I bet a lot of people were thinking, wait, am I on the right site? πŸ™‚

  142. Hi Matt,
    I think the existing back links are not pointed to the old and new domain.

  143. The Thesis theme rocks. So easy to use. I love it personally.

  144. Matt, I guess you stayed with tigertech. I’m about to relocate a client’s website to tigertech, so it’s reassuring to know you’re a satisfied customer. One thing I noticed, when I did who.is on mattcutts.com, it lists your name & address. Tigertech will make that private as I understand, so you instructed them otherwise? I’m also curious which plan you’re on–I assume platinum. I’ll start my client on gold; it’s nice that if you exceed the quotas for disk space, CPU, etc. they charge you modest amounts for the excess.

  145. Hi, I want to ask for advice from SE experts here πŸ™‚ I have wp blog. Should I do noindex for all tags? Or just enought canonical urls?

    Thanks

  146. Hey Matt,

    It’s nice to see someone from Google actually posting results on the 302/301 as there is a ton of information out there with misleading information. Especially when transitioning domains. Do you recall if you had a substantial hit to your rankings (being the content and urls stayed the same) by your new domain not having any real history?

  147. I was looking for information about 301 and 302 redirects, and came across this article — thanks for confirming which one NOT to use (302) for a permanent redirect!

  148. Hey, do let us know the effect of making so many changes in one go!

    I don’t think I’d ever do the whole lot like that, how about an update?

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