I have a fledgling blog going that focuses on one particular slightly geeky subject. A few weeks ago I purchased “mygeekysubject.net” (not the real domain name)
Today, I found that “mygeekysubject.com” finally expired from the previous owner (who hadn’t used it), and I quickly snapped it up.
I have configured the “.com” to redirect to the “.net”, but I’m considering which one should be the “official” URL, as configured in my permalinks.
Which would you choose and why?
Any etiquette I should follow? One better than the other for traffic?
Am I going to hose my pitiful Google indexing if I suddenly switch over?
The more common and easy to remember one is certainly .com, but I’ve always liked domains that use .net, it has a nice ring. If it redirects anyway just keep the .net, it sounds cooler and isn’t as commonly used.
I’m of the old school. .com should be reserved for commercial enterprises. (Gonna make a buck off your geeky subject?) .net should be reserved for network infrastructure. (I know, I know, the floodgates opened to that one early on, but I can still wish…) My own personal domain ends in .org, but that’s only because I couldn’t get a .ca domain at the time (ten years ago!).
If I had to choose between the two, though, for a non-commercial site, I’d go with “mygeekysubject.net”
I don’t like .org for anything that isn’t an organization. For example, I bought a .org domain for our church website. But the points you raise about the original purposes of the others are valid.
Anyway, I own “.com” and “.net” so it’s going to have to be between the two.
.com. Don’t be dumb. That is where people will automatically go when you say you have a blog at “mygeekysubject”. Keep the .net for something secret that you only convey verbally to the coolest ultrageeks.
Be careful on the redirect in the long term, duplicate content can hurt your seo if you care. Make sure you have the right info in your robots.txt file.
As for losing the links in search engines, if you make them permanent redirects (forget the code), the search engines should do the right thing and come by the new address next time.
Well, not_alice, you raise plenty of questions in my mind.
I just checked, and I now have both domains pointing to the same hosting account, with “.net” listed as primary. No redirects.
Of course, when I click a permalink in my site, it does point to the .net version.
Will Google simply sort this all out if I keep both pointing to the same thing, since I’m certain that web sites do this all the time?
Do I have to claim both URLs from Google Webmaster Tools or are they automatically linked?
I imagine that the right thing to do is pick one and set the other to a 301 redirect (permanent), and then I can go my merry way without any hitches?
“right info in your robots.txt file”?
Right now, Wordpress creates the robots.txt file, with the “.net” version of the url:
Ah wordpress. there is a nice redirect plugin that I use, don’t recall the name and don’t have time to look right now. I think the documentation that comes with it addresses some of these issues though. Yes, 301 is what you want, the plugin will handle that for you on a page/post by page/post basis, or by regex. I think if you do that, then soon enough the search engines will stop coming by .net, and go to .com instead.
Then you could either remove the redirects (and take chances they will find you again) and give out .net to friends, or just give it out and let their own browsers deal with the redirect. Probably will see .com in the url bar even though they typed .net.
There are probably ways to make sure they see .net in the url bar, but that is too complex to go into here, depends on server configuration and your access to modify it. I am root on my servers, so I go in by hand and do whatever I want, but hosting accounts don’t work that way usually. It can still be done on the hosts I am familiar with, but depends on the exact situation and I can’t know that.
I now have mygeekysubject.com as the primary URL, and I configured Wordpress to make all of the permalinks use “.com”
Of course, if anyone has a strong opinion and can explain why I should go back to “mygeekysubject.net”, I can easily do so. Any thoughts?
This would be the time to do it, and not six months from now, since my infant blog only has a dozen or so posts and exactly one non-spam comment.
not_alice, I didn’t need to do any coding to get the 301s working; GoDaddy took care of it, though their technique is debatable (a 302 to a 301), I assume they are big enough that Google would properly interpret their funky redirects. Oh yes, GoDaddy provides the service you mentioned for keeping “mygeekysubject.net” in the address bar. They refer to it as Masking—I didn’t use that feature.
