Blog Moving

[AlexManifestMan]

For years we have had the Manifest Men blog (musclemanifesto) on the typepad platform. We want to move it over to our control. The existing url http://musclemanifesto.com is redirected to http://manifestmuscle.typepad.com/manifest_muscle/ We get about 145k pages views on the blog each month and the bulk of this (by far) is SE traffic.

So all that being said, if we are certain we want to move, are we better off leaving all the pages as they are, but starting the new blog off and change the redirect. Or put in a post with a link saying that all new Manifest Men blog info will be at a totally different address. There are 2033 posts and about twice that many images that are currently listed with google.

We don't have the flexibility with typepad that we would like otherwise we wouldn't be considering this at all.

What do you guys think?

[gaydemon]

I presume http://musclemanifesto.com is brand new, and your blog with traffic is: http://manifestmuscle.typepad.com/?

In terms of Google there is actually now a "Change of Address" option in Google Webmaster Central (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en). If you register a sitemap and account with them you will see that option there. What exactly it does, I don't know. But have a look at their "moving" guide:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en

You would probably want to do a redirect 301 to the new site. That should help to build up the new site, but it won't be possible to move all it's authority or ranking over.

The main problem for you is incoming links. How your site is ranked depends a lot on how many incoming links you have. Currently all those would point to http://manifestmuscle.typepad.com

I think Rawtop might have more experiance with testing domain moves. It's not something I've ever dared to do.

[AlexManifestMan]

We don't have many incoming links. I never worked to build those much since the blog is really just about Manifest Men. MuscleManifesto is the perm url that redirects to the typepad address so I could change that to go directly to the new location and leave the rest of it alone.

[rawTOP]

It doesn't look like musclemanifesto.com is the right domain - that's parked with supplement ads on it.

I don't have any direct experience with Typepad, so what I'm about to say could very well be wrong.

The issue you have is that I doubt Typepad will do a 301 redirect to something they don't control. Which sorta means you're fucked 'cause you can't migrate the content away from Typepad.

HOWEVER... It looks like Typepad can host the domain and I'm guessing they can redirect the old typepad.com URLs to the new domain. I'd start with that. Wait a year so so and let those URLs get established and then revisit the migration question if you still feel the need to.

But if you just want a non-typepad.com URL - let them do "domain mapping" for you. http://www.typepad.com/pricing/

[AlexManifestMan]

musclemanifesto is correct. We are moving the url over to the new location today and it has not yet moved on through. It was a redirect to the actual typepad blog. We are going to leave all the posts where they are for now and just start the new ones in the new location. From what people are telling me, the 2000 uniques a day are not that many or important. The old stuff will still be inplace with the existing urls in tact. But mostly I want more functionality than typepad offers.

[gaydemon]

musclemanifesto is correct. We are moving the url over to the new location today and it has not yet moved on through. It was a redirect to the actual typepad blog. We are going to leave all the posts where they are for now and just start the new ones in the new location. From what people are telling me, the 2000 uniques a day are not that many or important. The old stuff will still be inplace with the existing urls in tact. But mostly I want more functionality than typepad offers.

2000 isn't exactly small but not big enough either to really worry about it. Just put up a notice that your blog has moved and keep the old one live with the notice up.

Rawtops right, I didn't think Typepad not redirecting to new domains.