Technical users: Please help plan migration to BudgetLightForum.com

BLF Site-related Issues
1

Hi friends,

Well, due to a combination of outages at cz.cc as well as a number of reports of blockage or mis-labelling of BLF as a bad site due to the cz.cc ending, we need to move to a different site name (domain).

For less technically inclined users:

  • The new site name will be BudgetLightForum.com
  • It's not functioning yet! :)
  • After the changeover, BLF will look the same, and all the posts will be the same
  • Your username will work the same
  • (hopefully) All of our favorite budget flashlight expert users will still be here

For the techies around here, please help!:

  • We already own the domain names budgetlightforum.com and budgetlightforum.org
  • We're on a pretty good shared webhost with SSH access, cPanel, and the possibility to modify .htaccess
  • This forum runs on Drupal 6, set up as a "multisite installation" in the sense that we have only 1 Drupal code base that drives a couple of other Drupal sites of mine. However, BLF and the other sites each have their own database. In reality, the database won't be touched in the changeover
  • budgetlightforum.com is confirmed with Google via Google Webmaster Tools, and this site submits an XML sitemap nightly
  • Google considers budgetlightforum.com as a subdomain of cz.cc

So, my questions and concerns are the following:

  1. Does Google support "Change Address" on subdomains now? Still no answer on the Google forums, and it looks like my question is now buried. As I mentioned there in my question, it was previously unsupported to move a subdomain and maintain the search ranking via Webmaster Tools. Now it looks like it's possible, but I don't want to click "move" until we have all our ducks in a row. Anybody know for sure?
  2. Google recommends using a 301 redirect when moving a site. I've never done this before, and I'm not sure if I need to set this up via cPanel or by directly editing .htaccess? This will effectively force the URL to switch to the new domain, so that if someone visits budgetlightforum.com/node/200 it will redirect them to budgetlightforum.com/node/200 , correct? If this needs to be configured by editing .htaccess , I admit I'm a total failure at scripting and regex, which is all involved in .htaccess.
  3. Any other best-practice tips to maintain our search ranking and minimize disturbance for our users during the changeover?

Thanks to everyone for your help and patience! Hopefully we can get this sorted out over the next few weeks.

Best regards, have a great day/evening!

2

You can park more than one domain name to a site ..

Im still waiting to see what happens with mine as the old domain will end and I just got a new one parked on it ...

Will be interesting soon . But I dont see why you cant use more than one domain name as long as your physically not moving the site .

There should be the option to in the server controll panel ? [ I dont know what the host provides ]

But I currently have 2 domain names for one web site [ one will end ] .

3


4

First of all, you need to make budgetlightforum.com addon domain to budgetlightforum.cz.cc. Without this nothing of the following will work.

Then, you need to direct traffic to .com. This can be done easily with a script like this (which you need to include to every page):

<?php
if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'www.budgetlightforum.cz.cc' || $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'budgetlightforum.cz.cc')
{
$redirect = "http://www.budgetlightforum.com" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
header("Location: " . $redirect);
exit;
}
?>

So now, http://www.budgetlightforum.cz.cc/node/2205 will be redirected to http://www.budgetlightforum.com/node/2205

I think it should work with friendly urls (budgetlightforum.com/node/2205 instead of budgetlightforum.com/?node=2205) but if it isn't we can change it.

For the tests, it is better to use this code which does the opposite, it redirects .com to .cz.cc (so google isn't going to mess with the real site while we test things):

<?php
if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'www.budgetlightforum.com' || $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'budgetlightforum.com')
{
$redirect = "http://www.budgetlightforum.cz.cc" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
header("Location: " . $redirect);
exit;
}
?>

Now we can play with .com and find out when our code works as it should.

I think this can be the first step. It is too bad google doesn't allow to move a website from a subdomain to a domain. Now we must do the changes manually and we can't be sure we will not lose PageRank.

5

I think after just a week or two at the new domain, you will be OK with Google searches. Google spiders work pretty quickly. I have a domain that has changed from .com then to .net and a couple years later back to .com

I never noticed a difference in traffic with the changes.

6

Please make a ton of backups before this critical move, we don't want to experience what happened at the other place.

7

Hi Vectrex, will do! But no worries, we won't even be touching the database or even the files that drive BLF. Rather, we need to change the way the the rest of the internet connects to BLF. The actual changeover to make this same exact site function on a different domain is actually very easy, and could be done in 10 minutes. But we're trying to avoid burning bridges and loosing our links from the outside.

8

I've no experience of this.

Not sure how many appear here from Google as opposed to other links.

How many hits appear from Google as opposed to other sources? Or can this even be measured?

My personal take is just move it - PageRank will eventually catch up. Probably in a few weeks. Certainly less time than BLF has already been alive.

But I am probably not typical of your users - I believe I'm one of the first 10 registered.

The domain doesn't matter much to me, I'll still be here regardless of the address.

Is a simple redirect possible? Given that there are no changes to the underlying database, redirects ought to be possible - just grepping .cz.cc to .com or .org.

Personal choice, .org rather than .com but that's just me.

Either is just fine by me.

But what do I know?

Not much according to those whose job it is to tell me how I'm doing. No matter that I've been doing it for longer than all of them put together. And not one of them has a clue how to do it. People die when I get it wrong.

Last one died in 2009. Dropping 100m from a bridge will do it every time.

9

That puts it mildly.

10

If you run dual domain names , http://budgetlightforum.cz.cc and http://budgetlightforum.com you may avoid burning bridges ...

After a while , the web crawlers may have linked up the .com completely , and you may be able to drop cz.cc [ ? ]

11

I know I had a site where I lost a lot of page rank and never got it back when I changed domains. But that was because there were some key sites linking to the old site that was boosting the rank, so that didn't follow. I don't think that's the case with a forum (though I'll update links on the Flashlight Wiki as soon as the changeover takes place; not that the wiki has any page rank . . .).

12

I'd prefer .org as well...but having both probably couldn't hurt.

I was one of the website admin for the Co-op, but I've done almost nothing web based in the last 8years. Lot's has changed and I affraid I've forgotten everything that hasn't, so sadly I can't be of any help.

Ooh while getting that wiki link I noticed the the Coop has a new domain the awesomely redundant co-operative.coop :)