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Looking back: moving from .ORG to .COM

Written on November 20, 2008 – 3:32 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

On November 11 we switched our blogs domain name from TheNextWeb.org to TheNextWeb.com. About a month before that we bought the .COM domain in an auction for $1000 at Sedo. The move itself was fairly easy and took no more than 5 minutes.

Hans Allis, who runs Second Reality, the excellent hosting company which host TheNextWeb.com, simply set-up a new Domain name (the .COM version) as an Alias to our old domain name. After that we changed the Wordpress settings to reflect the new domain name. Wordpress does all the 301-redirects automatically so you don’t have to worry about that.

If you are moving to a new server you would need to set-up a .htaccess-file and a 301-redirect.php-file with the following content:

The .htaccess file:

 rewriteEngine On

 RewriteBase /

 RewriteRule !301-redirect.php /301-redirect.php [L]

The 301-redirect.php file:

 <?php header ("Location: http://thenextweb.com".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], true, 301); ?>

After that all we had to do is sit back and relax and wait for the world to catch up. Google took about 6 days to update their index which was very long as it generally takes them less than 15 minutes to find our newly published posts. Our PageRank updated perfectly to 6/10 after a few days too. The only thing that seems to be missing is the little links between our main domain if the search results. Hope these will reappear within a few days.

Feedburner also didn’t give us any problems. We simply logged in and changed our Feed url in the settings and we were done.

The only service that really gives us problems is Technorati. Unfortunately Technorati doesn’t allow you to change your domain name and refuses to update their database. That means that we dropped from a rank of 1,800 (The top 2000 sites of the world!) on TheNextWeb.ORG to a rank of 187,157 on TheNextWeb.COM. That just sucks and I can’t imagine we are the first blog to change its URL. Weird stuff.

Anyway, apart from Technorati, the whole thing went rather smooth and uneventful. Exactly what you would hope for with something as important as a change of domain names.

I hope you like that post!

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domain, pagerank, switch, technorati

2 Comments »

3 reasons why Knol will beat Wikipedia

Written on July 25, 2008 – 11:46 am
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor

Granted, most people do not see Knol as a direct threat to Wikipedia, and the title of the post might upset some people… Even Google noted that Knol is not designed to compete with Wikipedia, but you have to admit that from a online knowledge-base perspective, the sites are quite similar. Knol might become the preferred choice in this field within a very short time.

1. Moderated data

The big difference between the two is that Knol is less anonymous then Wikipedia, it allows the author to moderate their respective articles. The idea is that the Author remains involved, since their name and reputation is permanently attached to it. This approach takes people out of anonymity and potential incorrect contributions, and might lead to higher quality articles prone to error. Knol allows the community to rank respective Knols, and allows more Knols about the same topic, another big difference between the two services.

2. Ads enabled

Knol will have ads enabled from launch, supplied by Google AdSense. Simply enable your adsense in your profile page, and you are ready to make some money from your content. If you have been contributing to Wikipedia (or not), simply copy your data to Knol and get Adsense dollars from it.

3. Google pagerank

Wikipedia currently enjoys a lot of top ranking results on Google, but one day after launch, Danny from Search Engine Land found that 1/3 of the pages listed on the Knol home page that I tested ranked in the top results. Example: He found that the search term “How to Backpack” scores on number three, i’m not sure if Google applied any additional page-rank to the site, as the search term scores in the top three on Yahoo as well. However, the fact Knol’s search results appear on Google are an immediate threat to Wikipedia’s traffic.

In other news: Dutch company Knol sells steamcleaning equipment, not domain names!