Have you ever thought about moving your blog from one host to another, but were afraid of what might happen to your search engine ranking?
Should Double Dragon Jewelry move their blog?
Cindy of Double Dragon Jewelry Ltd. is deciding that exact scenario. She’s debating whether to move her new blog from BlogSpot.com (one of the most popular blogging software programs) to one that will allow her to keep her blog as part of her jewelry website.
Just to make this clear, her jewelry is being sold on:
Her blog is currently at:
doubledragonsilverjewelry.blogspot.com/
Her web host, i.e. CityMax which is us, has added a blogging option so she could have her blog on:
silverjewelry-sterling.com/blog.html
If Cindy moved her blog to silverjewelry-sterling.com, she would have to weigh the following:
1. Potential to improve the rank of silverjewelry-sterling.com
Having her blog on her CityMax site will do 3 things that may increase her search engine rank for silverjewelry-sterling.com. First, every blog post is new content on her site. The more often you update your site, the more often search engines will re-index it (i.e. check out your site to see what new info is posted so their links are up to date) and rank your site higher.
Second, each blog post Cindy does will hopefully result in more links to silverjewelry-sterling.com because people like her posts. Each link or “vote” helps your search engine ranking. If a website with a high search engine rank links to your page, this is even better. Their “vote” for your site is actually worth several votes.
Third, each time Cindy posts a new article, this will result in a new page that can be linked to from the search engines to her site. This in turn will mean more opportunities to draw people to her site. The more people who visit her site, the higher her website ranking will be.
2. Cannot take search engine rank of doubledragonsilverjewelry.blogspot.com to new blog
If Cindy already has a good rank for doubledragonsilverjewelry.blogspot.com,she cannot transfer that rank directly to her new blog pages. This is because her blog is moving to a different domain. The search engines will recognize this change as doubledragonsilverjewelry.blogspot.com has shut down and then when they index her blog on silverjewelry-sterling.com/blog.html, they will recognize this as a new blog.
3. Beware of duplicate content as it can get your site delisted temporarily
If Cindy plans to move over articles she posted on doubledragonsilverjewelry.blogspot.com to silverjewelry-sterling.com/blog.html, she could get silverjewelry-sterling.com delisted temporarily. The reason is search engines don’t like duplicate content or even very similar content. It looks like someone who isn’t an authority on a topic, just copied someone else’s content. Everything is automated too, you cannot tell Google: “Hey, I just moved my blog to ______.”
Cindy may want to only post new articles on her silverjewelry-sterling.com/blog.html blog at first and not copy over any of her old articles. After her old blog has been closed for a considerable amount of time (many months) such that the old page content is no longer indexed on search engines, she can then repost the articles.
4. Potential to increase sales on silverjewelry-sterling.com
Cindy is likely to get more people to click to other parts of silverjewelry-sterling.com since her website navigation will be right beside her blog posts. This may result in greater sales. Note that if she didn’t move her blog over, you could argue that she could simply have a link to her jewelry online store.
5. Functionality and Convenience
Cindy needs to weigh the functionality of the 2 blogs. To BlogSpot’s credit, they have had many years to develop their site and blogs are their primary focus. CityMax is an all-in-one website builder and must balance the benefits of developing the blog further against other features that are requested. When it comes to convenience, Cindy may like that she can manage everything on CityMax instead of having to monitor 2 websites.
If anyone has any other reasons to move or not move a blog, please post them in the comments.
September 15th, 2011 at 1:18 am
trying to find you, can i have your facebook or myspace?
September 21st, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Hi Argos. Our Facebook page is: http://www.facebook.com/CityMax
October 11th, 2011 at 10:22 pm
I have created several sites with you and I just launched your integrated blog feature on one of my sites.
I love the feature but I noticed that the search engines don’t read (crawl) my posts as often as the ones from my Blogger account. I rather have the blog integrated as part of my site and I’m very thankful for this new feature. Do you have any suggestions on how to let Google and other engines know that we have new posts? Thanks in advance.
November 15th, 2011 at 3:49 pm
Hi Tatiana,
The best way to get your blog crawled more often so that they show up on Google faster is to write regularly and to encourage people to post comments on your articles. From my own experience, I found that if I wrote at least 2 to 3 times per week, my blog was crawled about once a week. Note that it probably took at least 6 months to 1 year of writing 2 to 3 times per month to get to being crawled once a week. Good luck!