So here I am, sitting in the local coffee shop, checking out the mobile version of Wordpress. This will be my first post typed mostly with my thumbs so please bear with me. I am hoping this constraint will make my writing style more concise and cliché free. No promises though.

As you may have noticed, last week I decided to change the primary domain for this blog from jeremyturner.info to jeremyturner.net. As previously reported The Goolge has held a ranking grudge against dot info domains ever since GoDaddy had a fire sale on them a while back. Conceptually I still thought that jeremyturner dot info is more appropriate for this site but I realized that I may be hindering my progress towards my ultimate goal. Jeremyturner.net has always redirected to this site, but we all know that redirects don’t add up to much on The Google. So I went through all of the necessary steps with my hosting provider, temporarily removing subsomains and redirects, and changing the redirect and DNS info with my domain registrar. I also used this plugin to do a super find/replace in my wordpress database, changing all instances of jeremyturner.info to jeremyturner.net. Worked like a charm and was much easier than going through the pages one by one to fix all of the broken links.

This is a good time to bring up the importance of a Google Webmaster Tools account. From here I was able to sumit a new sitemap for my new URL, and more imporantly I was able to easily identify the pages of my .info site that The Google had in it’s index. The reason this is important is that once I changed my domain, these links would no longer be valid. They would redirect to a 404 “page not found” page on my new site. Furthermore, none of the pages of my new site had been indexed yet so it would be like starting from scratch. This is where the magic of the 301 redirect and the .htaccess file come in. I’m not going to go in to a tutorial here, but the practical upshot is that I was able to identify all the pages previously indexed by The Google and redirect them individually to their corresponding new pages on the dot net site. Designating the redirect as a 301 tells the Googlebot that the page has moved permenantly and that The Google should update it’s index to reflect this. This is a much more responsible technique than just yanking your site and/or changing your URL, and insures the transition runs smoothly. I was able to continue on right where I left off with whatever minimal traction I had gained with The Google.

Speaking of traction, I’ve written previously about jeremyturner.com’s fall from grace because of mistakes made while updating the content of the site, among other things. I’m not sure if he even cares about this (he should be targeting queries like “staying in business” and such rather than his own name since his site has shifted focus) but I am sure happy to know that since my change from dot info to dot net I have effectively replaced his site in The Google’s SERP. Your results may vary though, as The Google will change your search results according to your search history if you are logged in with a Google account (like Gmail.)

I think the moral of the story here is obvious: you simply shouldn’t be using a .info TLD for your domain if you are trying to get anywhere with The Google.