Three months ago, Freelance Writing Jobs moved from its rented space at Writers Row to its own brand new domain. The immediate results weren’t pretty.
- My Page Rank tanked from 5 to 0.
- My traffic dropped by half.
- My revenue showed a substantial decline.
- FWJ dropped in search engine rankings.
I did expect some negative effects in the very beginning, but nothing like this. October and November were bad months for me. Though things slowed down for the holidays, December showed a steady rise.
Three Months Later
Three months later and I’m back on track. Revenue is getting back to where it was in the beginning. Freelance Writing Jobs is back at the top of the search engines and my traffic is flowing nicely, thank you very much. Though it probably means nothing at this point, what confuses me is that I never got my page rank back. FWJ is still showing a page rank of 0.
Do I regret the move? Absolutely not! Even though it took a few months for my numbers to get back up, it’s nice not to have to share a domain with others. Now I know where all my traffic is coming from, I’m my own site administrator, and I have a lot more freedom.
Start from Scratch
The important thing was to work hard to build my blog up to where it used to be. Fortunately I was able to do so with some very shameless self promotion (sorry guys), a few well stumbled posts (thanks!) and lots of help from the good people here (I’m grateful).
Traffic isn’t only back to normal, it’s surpassing what it was before the domain change. Revenue isn’t quite up to what it used to be but it’s showing promise, and I’m receiving individual requests for advertising.
My biggest challenge is getting those who linked to me to adjust their links, but I’m working on it. In the mean time, it’s been fun watching the numbers rise. I know some blogspot and wordpress.com bloggers who are afraid to move to their own domains. Indeed it took me two and a half years to make my move. I’m here to tell you it was one of the best things I could do for my blogs and I have no regret.
As for that non existent page rank…does anyone really care about page rank anymore anyway?
9 thoughts on “My Blog: Three Months After the Domain Change”
Deb, congrats on your move
Having your own domain will definitely help in the long run.
A few of my sites suddenly recovered some of their lost PR, so maybe it’s an epidemic.
This is a common issue – your PageRank is being split between 2 versions of your domain, one with the www and the one without.
freelancewritinggigs.com has PR4 but http://WWW.freelancewritinggigs.com (like when you click on home on your site) has PR0. You should have one redirect to the other. Choose one and use it consistently accross your own site and when linking on other sites. Notice here on performancing they redirect http://www.performancing.com to performancing.com.
> My biggest challenge is getting those who linked to me to adjust their links,… Indeed it took me two and a half years to make my move.
Changing a domain is really worth it’s own article and checklist. I never did it when a site was up and running well. I only moved content from sub-directories to sub-domains. Or sub-domains to their own domains after the initial test runs.
Constantly checking for still existing old links is an absolutely necessary task. Don’t forget the bookmarks on i.e. del.icio.us!
If you know that you will make the move then you should always keep the old blog and start to post excerpts with links to the new blog much in advance (at least six months and more). Hard switching is not recommended.
It’s gone again but it was just showing a PR 4. Now that’s really odd.
We’re moving this month and you brought up a lot of our worries.
On the other hand, while the short-term effects of a move might hurt us, the long-term effects are going to be so, so worth it. The new site’s beautiful, it’s appealing, Harry and I feel comfortable working with it (kind of like a home, eh?) and readers are going to enjoy it more.
I still don’t see pagerank
Well….what do you know. I magically have a page rank today. When I wrote the piece on Friday however, there was nothing there. I promise.
Good job debng.Well it took time for me to earn a domain name,but i was always eager to move on a domain.Between FWG has a PR4.why do you think it doesnt have a PR? And by the way who cares too much with PR.Few of my blogs received a good PR without i making any efforts to improve them. I was hoping them in sandbox 😛
Good job again and best of luck with Freelancing.I appreciate people who are individuals.
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