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Have you ever said, “I wish I had known what I know now when I started all of this” I’ve said it over and over during the last year. I’ve continued to make improvements to all the sites we have but there has been this nagging desire to put it all together and see if it can be made better.
The Decision Process: Start Over or Refurbish
The great internal debate and the reason for many sleepless nights over the past three weeks has been deciding how to proceed with this project. I really wanted to see what a new site would be like building it from the ground up, but I didn’t want to be competing with myself in the search engines either.
The debate ran something like this:
I have a new domain name that is keyword specific verses a domain name that is not specific and a blog url that is long and cumbersome. The home page itself has a url of :
http://www.barbaralasky.com/tucson-real-estate-blog/ Pretty long isn’t it. I’m sure you noticed I have a “poison” word in the URL , more about that later.
Add a post to the home URL and it looks like this:
http://www.barbaralasky.com/tucson-real-estate-blog/tucson-real-estate-news/tucson-record-number-of-unsold-homes-flood-the-market/
This is even longer. Couple that with the information that “Google doesn’t like long URL’s” and I have to say this is a long URL. It is not keyword specific at least not in the beginning where the keywords should be weighted.
Refurbish
By that I mean, take all the pages of the website and the blog put them under the new domain name and do a permanent 301 redirect to the new URL.
Advantages:
- It puts every thing together in one place
- You don’t split the juice
- You have a consolidated effort on the web
Disadvantages:
- You loose all your back links
- You start over building new links
- You risk confusing the search engines if you don’ t get the 301 redirect right
- You might see your web traffic almost disappear
The Decision:
I took the safe way out. It keeps the old sites doing what they are doing now. I don’t sacrifice any web traffic already established. More important I don’t want to get thrown out of the house running a blog lab experiment that kills our web presence. That last one weighed heavily in the decision.
If you want a sneek peek http://www.tucsonazrealestateblog.com of course feel free to link to it if you want to : )
Tomorrow, I’ll post more on this site experiment and the new site. I’ll also share some insights I’ve been gathering on comments and do-follow.
Post Tags: build-a-real-estate-blog , Real Estate Blogging
Stumble it!
2 responses so far ↓
1 Kristal Kraft (5 comments.) // Aug 30, 2007 at 7:06 pm
OK, let me guess, the “poison” word is your wife’s name?
I can identify with the “wish I’d known then what I know now.” Life would be so much easier without the challenge of an ignorant past!
2 Dave Smith (491 comments.) // Aug 30, 2007 at 8:17 pm
No my wife’s name is fine, the “poison” word is “blog”
But as in most of life things change. the word blog used to indicate it was just a social networked run on at the mouth with nothing noteworthy to say in the world. You know kind of diarrhea of the keyboard.
But blogging has evolved and there are now very noteworthy blogs and urls with the term blog in the url. You will still find lists of poison words that contain blog.
I guess someone at Google forgot to read that information when it created blogsearch.google.com : )
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