DMOZ update speed
Today my amendment to the DMOZ listing for the Powerline Communications site IPCF was finally accepted.
There now follows an account of my misguided attempts at changing an established web site’s name and address to improve search engine visibility…
Way back last year I made a decision to change the site URL from www.ipcf.org to powerline.ipcf.org, believing the new name would help improve search engine positioning. I created the new sub-domain and redirected all traffic from the old name to the new. At the same time I contacted DMOZ to request their listing be updated.
Almost immediately I lost a significant amount of traffic (95%) which I assumed would return once the search engines figured out what had been changed. Well, traffic did climb slowly, but only up to approximately 15% of its previous level, eventually recovering to 50% after the DMOZ listing had been updated several months later.
My experiment had failed, so I needed to revert back to the old name. Only it wasn’t quite so easy, as I’d done what’s known as a Permanent Redirect (a “301″ in technical terms) to the new name, instructing the search engines to remove the old site from their listings.
So how could I change back to the old name? I couldn’t simply do a permanent redirect back to the old name, as then both names would be in danger of being classed as “the old site”. I came up with the idea of creating a temporary “We’ve Moved” page on the old site, and waiting until that page got picked up by the search engines, this way proving that the old name hadn’t been blacklisted or otherwise marked down. Once this new page appeared I could then safely move the whole site back to the old name.
If only it were so simple. During this time the new site was busy being indexed by the search engines, and of course it now had the links from the DMOZ clones. I now needed to add a permanent redirect back to the old name. I also had to write to DMOZ and explain my whole sorry situation, that I’d taken some bad SEO advice, and that could they please update my listing back to the old name and URL.
Today my DMOZ listing has reverted to www.ipcf.org for which I am very grateful, and hopefully traffic will eventually return to the site. If the signs are promising I’ll have to start working on the backlog of news and articles which had been building up during this time of uncertainty.
There ends my sorry tale. But with two important lessons learned, DMOZ does aid search engine positioning, and while many people rant about their speed or lack thereof, they do listen to user requests, and are willing to help. Secondly, changing domain names must be considered a long term plan, with drastic short term consequences.