After the soft launch of the new Toongabbie Anglican Church web-site on 19th December, on Thursday (29 Dec) the old site was switched off (well redirected actually).
With the launch of the new site nearly every page on the site has a different URL. Now, Google has always been a friend of our site, at least the .org version. When the .org.au was purchased (ages ago) and set to mirror the .org site, Google seemed to penalise the .org.au site, giving it a lower page rank. Google doesn’t like two domain names for one web-site, and so penalises the second one accordingly. This meant, that whilst we appeared at the top of a search for “Toongabbie”, if the search was restricted to Australian sites, we appeared well down.
So, the aim of the cutover was to keep the good PageRank of the toongabbieanglican.org site, whilst migrating everything smoothly to the toongabbieanglican.org.au site. The way to do this properly is using HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects (as per Google’s instruction).
Like most web hosts, DreamHost allows you to redirect a domain, and, it does it correctly with a 301. See what happens with the redirection of mcm.toongabbieanglican.org.
However, this is no use when all the page addresses changed. I could have used PHP to do the redirections, but I stuck with using a .htaccess file. The final .htaccess file (basically a plan text file) is 128Kb! Although, it’s size doesn’t seem to be causing problems.
During the creation of the new site, and the duplication of data to it, I used a custom field in Expression Engine to record the entry ID from the old site. This then allowed me to export the Expression Engine tables that included the new URL, and make a correlation to the old web address. So, in the end there are around 800 individual addresses being redirected. If I missed any, I will pick them up from Mint.
(Geez, this is turning out to be a long entry)
Once I had made the DNS changes, the problem was testing. It seems that the DNS servers of Bigpond (my ISP) are really slow to update. The Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker is a simple means of checking that a page is redirecting correctly.
Before the cutover, the .org.au site was getting about 20-30 unique visitors per day. After the cutover, that number soared. I posted the other day about how popular the Christmas Wallpaper was on the .org site. Well, obviously that traffic was now hitting the .org.au site.
Above: Mint showing the change in traffic after the cutover.
The reason for visits to the Christmas wallpaper is still fascinating, and I haven’t fully understood it. Although, I have a few more hints:
- Many of the referrers are coming from Google Images (example 1, example 2). Problem is, these searches don’t seem to have the search string in the url. So, I have no idea what people are searching for.
- Another source of traffic, not referrers, is seen in the server logs only. People are hotlinking the images in various blogs, in particular the obviously popular myspace as they wish each other a Merry Christmas.
