A few minutes ago we made a big change to SEOAndy, we moved from seoandy.com to seoandy.NET
We’ve thought about and discussed this move since around Christmas time and today (23 march) we finally made the move. It’s not been easy and the next few weeks maybe a tad difficult for us and the website. But the move had to be made, sooner rather than later.
Given the number of questions we asked ourselves over the past months we wanted to share some of the important questions which we think you to would be asking…
Whats the main reason to move domain?
Ultimately, the move has been on the table for over a year – but back in November 2013 Facebook forced our hands by marking the site (intermittently) as spam – requiring those sharing to confirm it isn’t spam and enter a captcha. This meant our number of shares to facebook significantly dropped, almost over night.
But it’s been on the table for a while, as I’ve said. It’s been on our minds because seoandy.com was under near constant attack by hackers and DOS attacks. Now moving domain, we know, won’t solve all of these issues but hopefully it will mitigate a few direct attacks for a while.
What are the side effects of the move?
The biggest side effects that we know of are…
1 – Potential Drops In Ranking
2 – Public Widget Loss of Social Shares
3 – Potential Confusion From Readers
Hopefully we’ve mitigated numbers one and three by use of redirect code, updating search engine webmaster tools and keeping the template exactly the same at this point.
There is little we can do about the social share drop right now, but with redirects those previous shares if clicked will have just as much effect.
How will this effect SEO Andy search rankings?
This is obviously the big question on everyones mind who writes for SEO Andy, any many of our readers.
The answer is that although initially we will see a slight drop in rankings, we’ve done everything we can to maintain them. We’ll be going into detail about this in coming weeks, bare with us though whilst we monitor things – we’d like to give you the full picture rather than tell you just now exactly whats happened.
SEOAndy.com was down and not forwarding for a while, why?
This in part was due to the mechanism by which we chose to change domain names, and partly due to some issues with the way the .com domain was set up. This previous set up, which included pages being loaded via Google Page Speed Service, means that many people saw the website down for a few hours – in particular those using Google Chrome.
In essence the old domain had all “forward facing” DNS settings via Google, this caused issues for Facebook (as it saw that as spoofing and spammy, as it’s not a common service to use unlike other CDN’s), this was also flagged by other platforms – further to this it made resetting the domain without loosing things like email settings and settings of sub-domains quite hard work.
At the time of publication, we also know that some users across many browsers won’t see anything on the .com domain.
We apologize for this, things should return to normal within a few hours.
[update: 13.00 24/march/14]
We are now officially service from the seoandy.NET domain – we have had issues with the .com forwarding traffic, this is an issue that should now be resolved.
We will begin publishing articles again in the coming days, with a return to normal service next week.
If you encounter ANY bugs or issues let me know on twitter @andykinsey or leave a comment below
[end update]
Original Content by SEO Andy @ Maintenance Update – March 2014 [updated]
