by It’s been about a month since all 14 of our former network blogs, Urban Semiotic, Go Inside, Boles Blues, Panopticonic, Carceral Nation, Boles University Blog, 10txt, RelationShaping, United Stage, WordPunk, Memeingful, Scientific Aesthetic, Dramatic Medicine and Celebrity Semiotic became this Boles Blog. In that brief time, we’ve published over 80 new articles. That’s a World Publishing Record for any of our single blogs.
Condensing all our blogs thoughts into one mind was a high risk and big reward process. All our URLs and links sort of broke — there was no http://BolesBlogs.com domain as a blog before we made the change — and that meant doing 301 redirects from all the old URLs to the new domain.
So far, everything seems to be going well. It doesn’t look like we’re losing any links or readers from Search engines in the move. Readership is up and stable, and Bing and Yahoo are reporting massive upticks in our indexed pages and appearances in search:
The Crawl Errors look scary, but that error pile also includes 301 and 303 redirects, so the details of those errors demonstrate our move, and blogs compression, is actually working, and working pretty
well, on a technical level.
It will likely take another few months for things to simmer down a bit on the Search side of our move as the new blog domain becomes permanent. Outside websites will need to update their links to use using the BolesBlogs.com domain to get the best search juice back again, and it will be a slow, but methodical, slog for all our published work to be reindexed for good.
If you have any links to the old blogs, we ask you to update them if possible — it will help your own Google and Bing and Yahoo indexing score to be linking to the permanent BolesBlogs.com domain — and you will help us streamline the transition process even more.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter — and if you like our page on Facebook, you will appear right here in our sidebar as a friend of Boles Blogs!
We thank you — and we’ll keep on publishing new work as quickly as it is written!
UPDATE:
I couldn’t get the Google Webmaster Tools data to load this morning, but it’s loading now — we’re up, way up, and doing well:
Search queries are working and being recorded!
More updates will be shared as we know them!
Follow on twitter – check , like on facebook – check , no active blogs with links to here – check – publishing new work as quickly as it is written ……………………. ah ………. knew there was something I had to do today !
Seriously, glad the move has been sucessful and that the internet is keeping up with you !
Love that checklist, Nicola! You’re on board, and I love that!
The internet loves new articles, and I appreciate your dedication in making that happen. I know things, and times, and people, wax and wane, so don’t feel any pressure to produce. We are grateful for whatever time you have to offer.
Yes, the redirect plan is working flawlessly. These are permanent redirects, too, so once the search engines get done processing these changes, everything will start to rise even more. Another couple of months and we should be set!
Happy to know that the move and merger has been as smooth as it has been! 🙂
WP.com wants $13 to redirect an old blog URL to a new one for a year — tempting for ease of us — but at a total cost of $182, I wondered if I could find a better way.
Turns out PairNIC.com’s “website forwarding” works the same was as the WP.com service, creating 301 redirects, leading to permanent changes and that service is bundled with the price of my domain registrations!
I’m glad we used WP.com for all the blogs and the permalinks structure is the same for all the blogs — and all the domains just get replaced in the redirect and land in the right place — otherwise, I’d be doing a lot of handmade .htaccess redirects and rewriting that would make this whole thing a bloody mess.
I love that your transition went so smoothly. I never would have guessed that there was so many other blogs before this one. Everything is so fluid and well put together. Not to mention the writers on the blog are quite talented as well and I think the constant writing has been helping out as well.
So far so good — all the old blogs are actually the category names for the new blog — I like that reflection of content and all the old articles for the old blogs are in their categories.
I love that you used the names of all he old blogs as category names for the new one. I know people usually find it so hard to put their articles into categories. Really good idea.
Yes, it makes it easier to find old articles — if you can remember the original category! SMILE!