websense

So, we’re about 2 months in after our domain name change. As we expected, it was a headache, but things are beginning to return to normal. Most of our SE Rankings have returned and our traffic is getting back to normal. As compared to our benchmark, we’re still waiting for our SE Saturation and a few other items to catch up, primarily in Google. MSN and Yahoo seemed to re-index and rank the new domain much more quickly.

Even though it’s not over yet, the domain change was well worth it. In time savings alone, it has paid for itself if you consider the time saved in giving out an email address at a 3 letter domain as opposed to 15 letters.

So, if you’ve got to go through a domain change for one reason or another, or if it’s optional and you’re still considering it; I’d highly recommend you read the case study Jen has been building as we went through this process. She’s done a great job of tracking all of the ups and downs, things we did right, wrong etc. It should help you through the process and or decision.

So, lets pretend you have a moderately successful company, that generates many of it’s leads on the web. Lets also assume that this business has been online for a while, like 10+ years. All SEO’s know that lots of links get built, content gets indexed, rankings climb etc. over the course of 10 years. Your domain builds an online reputation, so to speak. So, after 10 years, this site has thousands of phrases generating really qualified traffic, some very general, some very long tail.

Then, one day, the owner of “said company” decides it’s a great idea to get a new domain. What do you, as an SEO who has already advised him that this is a really bad idea? By the way, walking out is not an option.

Well, that’s what we’ve done. I can’t believe it, but after marketing tkg.com for over 10 years, we were able to finally acquire a better domain. A few of us at TKG have been “stalking” the domain tkg.com for quite some time, and we finally got it!

How can we resist going from 15 letters to 3? Not gonna happen!

So, at the risk of our whole SEO department going AWOL, we’re doing it. We hope to be switching to the new domain early next week.

Of course, we have an elaborate scheme (I mean plan) to protect our rankings and the equity our domain has built up as much as possible. So, we’ll be running a little experiment to see just how quickly we can make this transition to our new domain.

It should be live early next week. If you feel like contributing to the cause and creating a link to the new domain tkg.com, that’d be great!

For those who are interested, we’ll be sharing the impact of this on our site, it’ll be located at tkg.com/tkgseoblog. We plan to share the whole scoop, SE rankings, Saturation, Link Pop etc. It’ll be interesting to see just how fast we can recover the traction we currently have.

Our Cleveland Search Engine Marketing Made Simple Seminar in Cleveland kicked off a couple of hours ago. We’re at the Rec Center in Strongsville, with a small group of just under 30 people.

While some of the sessions are going, I am sitting outside chatting with Anita Campbell, regarding the changes she’s been observing in the Search landscape. One of the things she mentioned is the speed of indexing and ranking. With her blog, Smalll Business Trends and how quickly rankings change and shift very quickly these days.

So, we decided to run a test. We’re both going to write a post about some pretty non-competitive phrases (Search Engine Marketing Made Simple Experiment) and just see how fast they get indexed and rank. We’re guessing that they’ll be indexed and ranking within a half hour.

I’ll post later with the results.

Edward Lewis made some great comments in his post about SEO Certification and the fact that it doesn’t truly exist. The SEO Industry faces enough challenges with regard to being trusted. That last thing we need to do is mislead our market.

While I would be a supporter of some real standards, best practices and a consistent means of evaluation of these things, Edward is right, that “governing body” doesn’t exist yet in the Search Engine Optimization industry. So, much is left in the “grey area”, which isn’t good for anybody. Especially those seeking a quality SEO vendor. We’d be thrilled to participate in the process of establishing these things.

Thanks for the great post Edward, it needs to be addressed!

Some of the better questions and answers that came up:

Is there a an SEO advantage for either .NET or php?

Short answer is no. They are both perfectly fine languages and can generate search friendly dynamic content as long as some simple guidelines are followed.

Mod Re-write, or Isapi Rewrite to keep URLs clean, and of course avoid the common mistakes like session id’s multiple URLs for the same content etc.

There was some mild debate on the panel, as Sage mentioned that in his experience, it has been easier to get Mod Re-write accomplished, thus giving php an advantage for him. Because of our development backgrounds, Colton and I have both had relative ease with both .Net and php.

A good question from an attendee: “I have millions of pages and only a small percentage are indexed. Should I use sub domains”?

All panelists seemed to agree that sub domains are not likely to solve the problem. There is likely another core issue, such as session id’s, duplicate content, query strings, etc., to look into first.

It should come down to the user. If there is reason to break it out into many sites, for the users sake, then do so. However, if it makes more sense to have all of the content under one domain for the user, then leave it that way and diagnose the real reason the site isn’t being fully indexed.

A member from the audience did make the point that with a site that large, it may simply be a matter of disc space. He had observed in his own industry, that sites with millions of pages just don’t get fully indexed due to limited resources of the engines.