Site Move Experiences
I've moved my other site, Belchfire.net, from PHP-Nuke to Invision Power Board. In addition to changing the content system on the site, I also changed URLs from www.belchfire.net to themes.belchfire.net.
Never having done this before, I have no idea how this will effect my search engine listings and rankings. Prior to the move (completed on August 4, 2004), www.belchfire.net had over 150,000 backlinks on the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, AllTheWeb, etc.). I've redirected the top pages and sections using 301 http response codes, (i.e. http://www.belchfire.net/xpthemes.html redirects to http://themes.belchfire.net/index.php?act=Downloads and sends a 301 ‘Moved Permanently’ response to the client), but until Google and other sites update at the end of the month, I'm holding my breath that I don't lose all the links and listings I've worked so hard to maintain over the last three years.
Listings prior to sitemove:
| Search Engine Saturation | Back-Links | ||
| AllTheWeb | 62500 | AllTheWeb | 72900 |
| AltaVista | 63000 | AltaVista | 73500 |
| 18200 | 3630 | ||
| HotBot | 7219 | HotBot | 18634 |
| MSN | - | MSN | 17542 |
| Yahoo | 32400 | Yahoo | 74500 |
Google PageRank: 6
Yahoo Rank: 5
I kept the old site up at a new URL, oldsite.belchfire.net, and linked it off the themes.belchfire.net homepage. Good news is Google is spidering the new site well. I'll keep you posted on how my rankings fare during the next Googledance. Stay tuned!