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 $1000 at Sedo. The move itself was fairly easy and took no more than 5 minutes.
Hans Allis, who runs Second Reality, the excellent hosting company which host TheNextWeb.com, simply set-up a new Domain name (the .COM version) as an Alias to our old domain name. After that we changed the WordPress settings to reflect the new domain name. WordPress does all the 301-redirects automatically so you don’t have to worry about that.
If you are moving to a new server you would need to set-up a .htaccess-file and a 301-redirect.php-file with the following content:
The .htaccess file:
rewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule !301-redirect.php /301-redirect.php [L]
<?php header ("Location: https://thenextweb.com".$_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.
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