Tips on changing domain name

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 | 10:10 AM|

I'll be posting specific practical tips relating to the change to custom domains on Blogger soon, but as basic preliminary points I'd suggest:
grit your teeth and make the change ASAP - the longer you leave it, the harder it will be and the longer it will take to build your search engine cred back up under the new domain name
take a deep, deep breath and fortify yourself first with plentiful supplies of ice cream, chocolate, cake and whipped cream or your alternative de-stresser of choice - you may need 'em to keep you sane, watching your stats take a deep dive and stay down for months can be a "nerve-wrecking" experience!
make sure there's a 301 permanent redirect on the old domain name to the new one - Blogger seems to do this automatically for custom domains, redirecting anyone who tries to go to http://olddomain.blogspot.com/year/day/whatever.html to http://www.newdomain.com/year/day/whatever.html (sort of - where it doesn't do that it could cause more problems, but that's for a different post)
do keep adding to your site or blogging after the change, as much and as often as you can - both to produce more quality content to hook in the search engines, and also because more frequent updates of your site or blog should help you build up the new domain name's ranking.

More specific howtos, dos and don'ts etc when changing to custom domains will follow, so stay tuned.

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