Blog Platform Directory Structure - Pt 2 of Architecting Your Blogsite
At some point in your blogging career, you may decide that your blog platform is no longer suitable for you or your co-contributors. Having learned from my own mistakes, I say to you, save yourself some trouble in the future by properly setting up your new blog now.
The assumptions here are for a new blog on your own domain. That is, a blog about to be set up. Maybe you're moving an old blog, maybe not. If you are moving, I recommend not copying your old posts to your new blog, so as to avoid being dinged by the SEs (Search Engines) for having duplicate content. Instead of deleting old posts and copying them over, I also suggest you leave your posts where they are, to maintain their Google PR (PageRank). Feel free to refute my claims, although tell my why :)
You could move your old pages wholesale - that is, remove the old text but redirect the URLs to the new domain. I'm not sure how this affects PR for your old pages, but I would think that this it would be negatively affected.
What's possibly more important is how you set up the directory structure on your new domain. I say to you that if you are about to set up a brand new domain with a blog/ online community, I highly recommend that you don't install your blog platform into the root directory of your webserver. Doing so may give you headaches later on.
As a concrete example, let's say you have selected WordPress as your platform. Do not install WordPress so that it runs from, say, http://www.myblogdomain.com/. Instead, create a subdirectory and use that for the base of your blog platform installation, then create a homepage/ splash page that links to the subdirectory. Some platforms even let you create a front/splash page that differs from the template used for the rest of the site.
So the URLs http://www.myblogdomain.com/ or http://www.myblogdomain.com/index.html would be the same splash page, and would point only to, say, http://www.myblogdomain.com/wordpress/ - or some directory name that doesn't even mention the blog platform. One possibility is a version number for the blog - say http://www.myblogdomain.com/v2p1/ (v2.1) - or the year - say http://www.myblogdomain.com/2006/. What you use depends on your blogging needs, how long you think your blog will be around for, and how often you may need to change platforms.
The reason for installing into a subdirectory is to prep yourself for a future move. If you decide to change platforms later, you'll most likely want to keep your old pages, whether they are static HTML or dynamically-served from a database - especially in the case of the latter. If you install your blog platform in the root of your webserver, you probably can't ever install another platform there in the future, without destroying access to the old pages.
On the other hand, having a dedicated subdirectory for each blogging platform you install means the ability to maintain archive pages from the previous platform/ blog version. You will, of course, have to update your old pages and splash page with an undoubtedly visible link to the new blog. This promotion will be necessary, since the old blog version will start to lose its freshness ranking, and the new one won't have any Google PR or its equivalent for other SEs.
Having moved several blogs from blogspot.com to their own domain(s), I've seen how this affects both traffic and revenue, however little you may have been earning in the first place.
(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/
Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogger, multi blogs, blogging platform, adsense, ad revenue, page rank
The assumptions here are for a new blog on your own domain. That is, a blog about to be set up. Maybe you're moving an old blog, maybe not. If you are moving, I recommend not copying your old posts to your new blog, so as to avoid being dinged by the SEs (Search Engines) for having duplicate content. Instead of deleting old posts and copying them over, I also suggest you leave your posts where they are, to maintain their Google PR (PageRank). Feel free to refute my claims, although tell my why :)
You could move your old pages wholesale - that is, remove the old text but redirect the URLs to the new domain. I'm not sure how this affects PR for your old pages, but I would think that this it would be negatively affected.
What's possibly more important is how you set up the directory structure on your new domain. I say to you that if you are about to set up a brand new domain with a blog/ online community, I highly recommend that you don't install your blog platform into the root directory of your webserver. Doing so may give you headaches later on.
As a concrete example, let's say you have selected WordPress as your platform. Do not install WordPress so that it runs from, say, http://www.myblogdomain.com/. Instead, create a subdirectory and use that for the base of your blog platform installation, then create a homepage/ splash page that links to the subdirectory. Some platforms even let you create a front/splash page that differs from the template used for the rest of the site.
So the URLs http://www.myblogdomain.com/ or http://www.myblogdomain.com/index.html would be the same splash page, and would point only to, say, http://www.myblogdomain.com/wordpress/ - or some directory name that doesn't even mention the blog platform. One possibility is a version number for the blog - say http://www.myblogdomain.com/v2p1/ (v2.1) - or the year - say http://www.myblogdomain.com/2006/. What you use depends on your blogging needs, how long you think your blog will be around for, and how often you may need to change platforms.
The reason for installing into a subdirectory is to prep yourself for a future move. If you decide to change platforms later, you'll most likely want to keep your old pages, whether they are static HTML or dynamically-served from a database - especially in the case of the latter. If you install your blog platform in the root of your webserver, you probably can't ever install another platform there in the future, without destroying access to the old pages.
On the other hand, having a dedicated subdirectory for each blogging platform you install means the ability to maintain archive pages from the previous platform/ blog version. You will, of course, have to update your old pages and splash page with an undoubtedly visible link to the new blog. This promotion will be necessary, since the old blog version will start to lose its freshness ranking, and the new one won't have any Google PR or its equivalent for other SEs.
Having moved several blogs from blogspot.com to their own domain(s), I've seen how this affects both traffic and revenue, however little you may have been earning in the first place.
(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/
Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogger, multi blogs, blogging platform, adsense, ad revenue, page rank
