Tucson-real-estate | Real Estate Blog Lab

The Combining of Two Blogs 55 Days Later

By Dave Smith Friday October 24, 2008

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I took two of my blogs and merged them into one. Tucson Real Estate In the News merged with Tucson Real Estate to form a single entity. The story of the process is documented in Combining Two Blogs in to One A Geeks Holiday Weekend.

I’m not sure when or who but there was a comment asking me to get back on the results of combining these two into a single entity. Some have asked me if I would do it again. Here is an update on how it is going and where we are at 55 days later.

Deindexing Reindexing Three Minutes of Radio Silence

Remember the movie Apollo 13. There was the three minute blackout period during reentry when there was no communication with the capsule and everyone was on pins and needles till the blackout period was over and communications reestablished. I wish it only took 3 minutes.

This is what it is like to merge two of your blogs into a single entity. Over 300 post on the News Blog, all indexed in Google had to be moved and reindexed to show up at the new site.

It wasn’t easy watching my traffic drop for both blogs to almost non existent during those early weeks of the merger. Yes there was a redirect 301 in place, but it didn’t eliminate the confusion Google had with the merger. Google suddenly saw more than 300 pages of content on the one blog’s sitemap.xml file and 300 fewer pages on the other one. I thought the sitemap submitted to Google would be the key to Google quickly grasping what was going on. It did turn out to be the key but not the way I thought it would.

Enter a conversation with Eric Blackwell

Eric and I had a catchup conference call one day to talk about the state of the RENet and RE-Blogosphere. It was during that conversation I mentioned to Eric the frustration I was having over getting my combined sites pages to be indexed. It wasn’t just the new pages that were effected by the merger, the existing pages were being deindexed as well. I had over 300 pages indexed on the one and almost 200 pages indexed on the other. A week after the merger I had a combined 101 pages indexed. I was adding new content daily and submitting the sitemap by hand as well as hand pinging. Nothing helped. This is when Eric suggested I turn into the slide.

Huh? You know how counter intuitive it seems when your car is skidding on ice to turn into the slide and not away from it. That is what happend with the merger of the two blogs

Delete The Sitemap

Eric said, “Delete your sitemap.xml file submitted to Google and make the bots crawl the pages themselves” I’ll tell you that was one solution that never crossed my mind nor would it have. But I trust Eric to know what he is talking about (I also felt l didn’t have anything to loose at this point : )

I deleted the sitemap.xml and within 24 hours I had 300 pages indexed. It continued to climb. Without me guiding the bots and Google with the sitemap they started crawling and finding lots of content to index. It climbed to 1200 pages then to 1460, to 1600 and is currently 1820 pages indexed.

The bots on their own started indexing tags as well as categories, achive pages, pdf files. Name it if it could be seen as a page the bots were indexing it.

Traffic Increased

The Hittail traffic for the combined site gradually picked up. It is now more than what the two sites were before.

I ran random searches for main posts I knew were indexed on the old site to see if they were coming up under the old URL or the new. Two weeks after deleting the sitemap it appeared all the posts were reindexed under the new site. (I was having a similar issue with another blog of mine from errors being generated in the sitemap.xml by the Google sitemap plugin. There was an error in the code (since fixed) wihch left the category out of the post URL on a blog using a custom permalink structure.

Moving UP in the Organics

The combined site is now moving up in the organics. It is #1 for quite a few targeted keywords from the News blog merged into the TAZ blog. The move for the most desired keywords has been gradual. It is hard to compete for some of these especially when there are long standing sites already in those positions. (Some have age on their side, some have deceptive practices, some both) Not easy to make a move on a search term with real estate in it, unless it is a long tail term.

It has only been a couple of weeks since getting the sitemap deleted and the majority of pages indexed. I hope to get a bigger boost in the organics in less than a month.

Would I do it over again?

Yes I would. It is easier to manage a single site. But there has been a diluting of the message of the news blog and integrating the content changes to “Voice” of both. It will take a little while for it to find a combined audience. I keep tweaking the content and sidebars to provide a good experience for both sets of readers and those finding the blog through search engines.

Continuing to add quality content is one of the most significant things you can do to increase both readership and lines in the water for those searching for information you provide about your community and market.

There is no substitute for good planning and layout of your blog. But, there are few bloggers that have the knowledge and experience to “get it right” from the beginning. It is great to know that it is possible and profitable to take two existing blogs and merge them into a single entity.

Hosting Your Images on Flickr

By Dave Smith Sunday October 5, 2008

On September 12th I wrote about “Hosting Your Own Image Files”, which by the way already has a PR 2 ranking for those following such things : ) In that post I asked about what others were doing for hosting their images. Self-hosting or using something like Flickr to host your blog images and link back to them.

Hosting Your Own Image Files

By Dave Smith Friday September 12, 2008

Is the Weight worth the Freight

I wrote in July 2007 about “Photos an Overlooked Part of Your Real Estate Blog Traffic” In short when you host your own photos and reference them in posts the photos and the URL to those photos get indexed by the search engines. They store those links and people doing image searches will find your site when they click on those images.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about what you can do to speed up your blog load time and keep the site from blotting with images. The main suggestion is letting Flickr host those images and put the links to the images in your posts rather than host the images yourself.

We use Yahoo’s servers and bandwidth and not our own when those images are displayed.

However, we also give up the link back to our site when those images are found in the image indexes of the search engines.

Is there value in the traffic coming from those image searches vs the decrease in load time and size of your home page in kilobytes?

Testing A Theory in The Lab on Images and Load Times

For the past week the images I’m using in my Tucson Real Estate blog posts have been hosted on my Flickr account. I don’t have any way of knowing if it is decreasing the load time yet. But i should have some idea of the homepage file size in a few days as I see it and other post pages sizes returned in Google searches.

I’ve been one to like hosting my own images. I’m also in favor of making those pages/posts load as fast as possible.

What do you think? Do you host your own images? Do you link to images from a Flickr account or some other photo sharing source?

I’ve learned a few things about putting Flickr images in posts and getting the captions to appear around them. I also learned about putting images on Flickr but keeping them out of the photo stream and onto blog posts. More on that this weekend.

What I’m really interested in is how you are handling images in your blog posts.

Combining Two blogs into One A Geeks Holiday Weekend

By Dave Smith Monday September 1, 2008

Holiday weekends are tough on Geeks. We are supposed to be doing things outside, with family, going to community or family outings and cookouts. When all we really want to do is that geeky project we have been putting off and now we have the time to do it. Saturday, I pulled the trigger on integrating two blogs into one. It wasn’t as pretty a picture as I had hoped but all is well.

The Combining of Tucson Real Estate in the News with Tucson Real Estate

I wrote about the testing process and how that had gone on last Monday, my internet day in Hell so to speak. I planned and planned and did more testing on how to pull of this integration project.

I thought I had it pretty well worked out DUH!

First I created the 301 redirect file for all the blog posts 250 + of those. Then I did backups and more backups and wrote down the procedure like it was a check off for a NASA lift-off.

When I ran the test integration last week I noticed the pages which were duplicate on each site were integrated so I had 2 contact pages and 2 sitemap pages and 2 archive pages, etc. I didn’t want to have to delete all these duplicates once the integration was complete. I deleted each of the duplicate pages from the original blog before exporting the files.

The procedure I followed to the best of my memory LOL

Delete the duplicate pages from the News Blog (the one being integrated)
Export the pages, posts, categories, comments, tags using the Export Function under the Manage tab.
Backup the receiving blog database using the WP Backup plugin
Backup the content using the same Export function above
Import the file created from the News Blog into the Tucson Real Estate Blog
Upload the new .htaccess file with the 301 redirects
Process complete go do something else (This didn’t happen)

Where it all went wrong

Everything proceeded according to plan till I got to step 5. After the first 65 post were integrated I got an Apache server error. I think it timed out. I repeated the process it passed those first 65 posts and said “already exists” it added another 65 posts till I got the same error. There were 250 + posts to integrate so it took 5 times running the import process to get to the bottom of the list and have the “All Done” message show up at the bottom.

Duplicate posts 5 copies

Not all the post were imported 5 times, it seemed two or three posts which were on the bubble of the 65 time out limit each time were added each time I did the import, even though it said “Already exists”.

The solution: I went to the manage tab and went month by month and removed all but the first import of the post. Everything about those posts was imported so it didn’t really matter which one I deleted just so I got it down to one.

The News blog had 7 months of content predating the other blog that is where I found the most duplicates, once I got to where those post were integrated into existing post the duplicates stopped.

Duplicate Categories

This got a little trickier. It duplicated the categories as well but it showed 4 of them with no posts in the category and all the posts in the first one created. This meant I had to be careful to delete only the empty duplicates (which I did).

I had one category show up as empty which I knew had 9 posts associated with it. Rather than try and figure out what this might be caused I I decided to close the browser now that the duplicate posts and categories had been taken care of and reopen. That did it. That category filled with the 9 posts.

The .htaccess file and redirect 301 saga

I thought it might take a little time for the new .htaccess file to “catch”. I was wrong! I got 500 server errors immediately and after waiting an hour switched back to the old file, immediately everything was back. What to do.

Try adding a few redirect lines at a time instead of all of them at once.

First 10 went well. Second 10 didn’t Then a light bulb went on.

The Easy Solutions that took hours to figure out

I had moved all the posts and categories and the permalink structure was the same on both blogs, (THIS IS IMPORTANT WHEN COMBINING TWO BLOGS) Maybe all I had to do was redirect the main directory change and that would be all I needed. A single line instead of 250+ lines.

I took the old .htaccess file and added this line

redirect 310 /tucson-real-estate-blog/ http://www.tucsonazrealestateblog.com/

The important part was that final / at the end of the redirect. It worked prefect. Hours of creating a huge .htaccess file with lines of 301 redirects wasn’t necessary and besides, it didn’t work.

What’s happened since Saturday Aug. 30, 2008

The reader reported from Feedburner have gone from 32 to 74 as of this writing. The news blog was showing 87 readers when I made the integration.

The blogtopsites went from 56 to 27 as of this moment. Traffic to the site hasn’t doubled but it has increased significantly and I suspect as the week progresses the desired effect of combining Google juice and incoming links will have the desired effect. I’ll write an update on the progress in a month. (Note to self Oct. 1 blog post on the integration of the two blogs).

I’m calling about your ad in the paper

By Dave Smith Wednesday February 28, 2007

barbara lasky photo On weekends when we are planning on holding an open house, yeah, we still hold them live as well as virtual on the net.

Anyway, as I was saying, on those weekends we will often run an ad in the paper complete with a photo of the property and details of the property and open house dates and time.

Down in the bottom right hand corner of the ad there is a cameo shot of the listing agent. We use visual branding here in Tucson a lot.

Last Saturday afternoon Barbara had a call come in when she couldn’t take it and it went to voice mail. When we were free she checked her message and the message was from a lady that saw Barbara’s open house ad in the paper and wanted her to get back to her, but since she wasn’t answering her phone she would appreciate a call, but wouldn’t be available until late Saturday night.

Barbara returned her call and left a voice message.
Sunday, Barbara returned her call and left a voice message.
Monday, Barbara returned her call and left a voice message.
Tuesday morning the lady called Barbara and said she appreciated very much Barbara talking the time to return her call.

Her urgent need on Saturday about the ad. . . . .