Ben Tremblay

Like a lot of people, I really like Gary’s business approach and his unique “over the top” personality really makes him a good speaker. This keynote is definitely one of the best I’ve seen from Gary so I’m sharing it with you. Hope you like it.

Gary Vaynerchuk @ Big Omaha 2009 from Big Omaha on Vimeo.

Like some of you might know, I’ve changed my domain name quite a few times and I’d like to talk about the impacts of theses changes from a SEO/traffic and branding point of view. Changing a domain name can be quite bad, but honestly it depends on a lot of things like the size of your website, if you already have a very well established brand, if you’re targeting local traffic, etc. For me, it has proven to be quite a smooth process, but here are my experiences and recommendations.

SEO

SEO is usually the biggest concern when changing a domain name because most people think this will lead to losing all their backlinks. While it is not the best decision ever SEOwise, there is some techniques you can use to make sure you don’t lose your existing PR and backlinks. Fortunately for us, Google published some guidelines for moving a website:

• Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

• Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google’s search results. When you’re satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won’t be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

• If you’re changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.

• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don’t have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like …/recipes/chocolatecake.html).

• To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.

• Add your new site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verify your ownership of it. Then create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site. This tells Google that your content is now available on your new site, and that we should go and crawl it.

• Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn’t showing unwanted 404 errors.

From my personal experience, within a month or two, you should recover your PR and the Google Index should be updated. So yes, expect some bad days especially within the first 2 weeks. Redirecting all your content to your new website using a 301 redirect is really the key, as it will tell Google the page has permanently moved and the new page should be considered as the original source from now on.

A nice side effect of using anchor text in the ranking algorithm Google uses is that you will continue to rank for your old name on Google. Even if the name is completely different, the links with your old website name now points to your new website because of the 301 redirect which mean you will most likely rank for that your old keywords.

A negative side effect that I can see from a SEO point of view is if you were targeting a specific geographic location with a particular TLD (.co.uk for example) and switched to a .com. If you don’t have enough backlinks from the country you are targetting and now don’t have a proper TLD for that country, you might disappear from the results for this country. So, be careful if you target a specific market or region.

Another negative impact that can happen is if you redirect your old domain to a subfolder of the new domain. Let’s say you are redirecting your established pizza.com domain to xyz.com/services/pizza. This might not help your rankings but honestly, it has nothing with moving the website, it’s a pure SEO issue: root domains tend to rank better than subfolders.

Backlinks

This is related to SEO, but backlinks are probably the biggest SEO concern for most people, so let’s make a new section for that. It is important to note that when using a permanent 301 redirect, all backlinks will now link to your new domain. If you look at Yahoo Site Explorer and  don’t see your old backlinks, it is absolutely normal, they will never appear for your new domain. They still exist, but Yahoo Site explorer doesn’t update with 301 redirects: it’s a bit dumb and only look for backlinks linking directly to your domain name. So, don’t panic, they’re still there and still giving you PageRank juice. Maybe not for the right keywords anymore though…

Branding and RSS Subscribers

To me, the biggest issue has always been branding and RSS Subscribers. I feel I’ve always made the right decision, but changing a brand’s name is never a good idea. People know you under a certain name and all of a sudden you’re someone else. Imagine if Wal-Mart decided to change their name, this would certainly impact their brand. Well, this is no different for a website, even if it’s on a much smaller scale. But you know, as long as changing  your name is a long term decision, it’s a good decision.

Another important aspect to consider is if the site you are moving is a blog and you have to change the RSS Feed address. If you can keep the same address do it as it will avoid you a lot of pain. Services like FeedBurner usually offer a 30 days redirect to the new feed address, but you will lose some subscribers in the process as not all of them will take the time to update their feed reader. You can also see it as a way to keep only your interested readers.

Conclusion

As you see, moving a site to another domain isn’t as bad as it seems from a SEO point of view, but could hurt your brand. I’m sure you can find quite a lot of horror stories out there and I can imagine it can be quite a nightmare when moving a website with a million of pages indexed (delicious for example), but for most people I feel it’s not that bad.

Yes, social media takes time. Being on twitter or Facebook and blogging can be quite time consuming and it’s one of the most common complaint from businesses and individuals. I can’t deny the fact that social media is extremely time consuming, but to be honest, that’s totally fine: it’s called natural selection.

Time is the best way to separate the serious people from the non-serious people and not just in social media, in real life too. Just ask an Olympic athlete how many hours he had to train to get to the Olympics, what sacrifices he had to make. Well, not everybody is ready to make those sacrifices and invest the necessary time and that’s totally fine: if it was easy to get to the Olympic, it would be one hell of a boring event. The event is great because only the best athletes compete and if they are great, it’s not only because they are talented people: they didn’t fear to put time and efforts.

Social media is no different. Of course it’s important to have a good strategy to make the most out of your time, but it takes time. Gaming the system just won’t work…long term.

I’ve spent some time lately thinking about the challenges ahead when it comes to the real time Web. There are a lot of challenges for sure, going from building an infrastructure able to index the real time web to being able to deal with the flow of information. To me, the real problem has never been about whether or not I’m going to be able to keep up with the flow of information that is only going to get worse or how Google or twitter is going to make all this scalable, but more about how are we going to make this information relevant, searchable and accurate? (more…)

I noticed something today that I think is fairly new on Google Search. There are now more useful informations on the LinkedIn profiles you will find in the search results. Searching for my name for example now brings the following LinkedIn profile on Google:

As you see, there is an additional line that shows my geographic location and my official LinkedIn profile title. I really like it as it makes results more useful and I see it as a good initiative. Nobody likes to click on 3 or 4 different profiles to find the right one and with this new addition to the search results it solves the problem.

I am sure we’ll see more and more of these for trusted domains in the future and it is definitely a good thing. Well, as long as it improves our search experience of course.

I found a very useful online tool for all of you, twitter lovers. The service is called twitter analyzer and it is some sort of Web analytics software, but for twitter. Honestly, I don’t know if there is some sort of service similar to Twitter Analyzer so you’ll tell me if it’s not the best tool out there, but so far from what I’ve seen, it is pretty powerful.

My favorite feature is by far the “How many of your followers are online” which gives you, as you expect, how many of your followers are online at the moment. Pretty useful if you want to share a link or one of your post and want to maximize exposure. Of course, that’s only one of the many features of twitter analyzer. (more…)

I don’t like the terms Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 for a number of different reasons. First of all, while Web 2.0 is a widely used term, you would be surprised by the number of different answers you would receive by asking 15 different persons: “What does Web 2.0 mean?” or “What is Web 2.0?”. This simply means that everybody has a different perception of what Web 2.0 represent and this is why I don’t like the term: no one really agree on a definition. Of course we can go with the Wikipedia’s definition that I personally like, but you can be sure that not everyone agree.

“Web 2.0” refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design, that facilitates communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.

Then, I’ve always seen the Web as a platform evolving every minute to become smarter and more useful to the users. The way we use the Web changes every day and that’s why the term Web 2.0 was only a buzz word I avoided to use until recently. I refused to timestamp the Web. (more…)

Without much advertising, I recently started a tumblr blog called ishare. I didn’t really talk about it until now because I wanted to test the platform and see if there was any benefit for me and of course, you. The reason I started a tumblr blog is that I had to solve a problem: how to reach the perfect combination of blogging and microblogging while still owning my content and providing value. For example, I love to share links on twitter, but 140 chars is very limited and it doesn’t allow me to comment and give my opinion on what I’m sharing. On top of that, it’s usually not worth it to blog about what I’m sharing on twitter as my comments would generally be one or two paragraphs. Finally, it’s important for me to own my content, I don’t like to give away too much content & traffic without receiving anything back eventually. So, how is it possible to microblog, blog, share material and own your content all at the same time? A tumblr blog. (more…)

Social media can be extremely profitable for businesses or individuals, and while it is easy to think so, it is not the solution to all your problems. Social media is highly ineffective if you don’t work first on the core aspect of your business: your products. More and more, I have to explain the benefits of a social media strategy and a strong presence on the Web, but it can sometimes be hard as I think a web strategy can be highly ineffective if the products or the services a business have to offer aren’t worth talking about. The good news is that your products don’t necessarily need to be uniques for people to talk about them: sometimes, a unique offering just does the trick. (more…)

About 10 years ago, a young company called Google completely changed the game. With their PageRank algorithm, Google found a way of automating what Yahoo! was mainly doing by hand: indexing Websites and finding the most relevant websites by analyzing their backlinks. Now, this is all history and Google is part of our daily life: most people use Google everyday. The most important part of this is that Google also found a way to monetize its search service by providing very targeted ads to the users. Now, Google is without a doubt the most profitable business in the Web industry. Google killed it, with a search engine. (more…)