« Search Tearing Down Walls Like It's 1989 | Main | The Emergence of Universal Search Engine Optimization »
Topix TLD Migration -- Six Months Later
September 24, 2007
I'm a big fan of Rich Skrenta, co-founder of NewHoo (née Gnuhoo, which eventually took the more recognizable name DMOZ), co-founder of Topix.net, and -- what may be the coolest of all -- author of one of the first known computer viruses, one of the few to be written before the actual term "computer virus" was even coined.
So that's all very cool, but the search-related part of all this was how, six months ago, Topix finally purchased the .com version of its domain and decided to make the move away from .net. The Wall Street Journal, in a mainstream SEO article that actually managed to hit most of the salient points pretty accurately, highlighted Skrenta's anxiety at the global domain change:
Such a simple change, Mr. Skrenta has discovered, could have disastrous short-term results. About 50% of visits to his news site come through a search engine -- and about 90% of the time, that is Google. Some companies say their sites have disappeared from top search results for weeks or months after making address switches, due to quirky rules Google and other search engines have adopted. So the same user who typed "Anna Nicole Smith news" into Google last week and saw Topix.net as a top result might not see it at all after the change to Topix.com.
Like a lot of SEOs, at the time I wondered what was so "wrong" with the time-tested (at least in my experience) method of full-on 301 redirects from the old site to new -- especially since the code would be short and sweet, with each old .net URL going directly to its .com counterpart.
The Topix crew had apparently heard too many domain migration horror stories. On his own blog, Skrenta noted,
...there've been a whole bunch of the seo posts saying essentially "hey, it's easy to move a domain, you just 301 it." Of course I know about 301 and 302 redirects. The problem is that half of these people follow up and say "you'll only be out of the index for a few months". They also ignore the problems that big sites have. A redirect for a small site may work great, but if you have hundreds of thousands of pages or more, there are lots of cases where this caused some form of not-in-the-index-anymore doom.The number of seo consultants who claim to know how to move a 100k+ page site is much smaller than the number who have actually done it.
That last point is a good one. Conventional wisdom in SEO is frequently spawned by 5% research and 95% extrapolation, which is often the best you can do. The other dirty little secret of SEO is that when you start seeing the same sort of anecdote often enough, it's tempting to put it in the "research" column.
Still, I'd not seen or heard of the type of monumental tragedies that Skrenta was talking about (at least within the last few years), and neither had Danny Sullivan:
I still remain surprised that the 301 is that much of a problem for even a big site. I just haven't heard of that trouble, of half the people saying you'll be out or whatever. If that's what you had been hearing, I can understand your concern. But it seems a pretty straight-forward change, and it shouldn't even be a burden on the server in that you're not actually talking about 100,000 of physical redirects that have to be created and check but a change of one domain to the other.
Ultimately, Topix listened to its heart (or maybe its board) and surprised me by opting for all-out duplication, running identical content on the .net and .com sites, avoiding any sort of redirection plan. So to call it a TLD migration isn't quite accurate. it's more like Topix.net bought a summer house and called it Topix.com. Again, from the WSJ article:
Concerned about that [redirection] strategy, Topix has run its site at both Topix.net and Topix.com for awhile. One danger with that approach is that it is unpredictable; Google will see two versions of the same page and could choose to show the Topix.net page most prominently.
This course would appear to run contrary to the advice even Matt Cutts gave in the article:
Google's Mr. Cutts says the search engine should ultimately understand what is going on when a site changes its Web address. He says the best strategy is to move one section of the site to the new address and see what happens before switching the whole thing.
Skrenta has since left Topix, but the duplicated domain strategy hasn't. Go to any page on the Topix.net site, and you'll see that the exact same page exists on the .com version of the site. Currently, Google shows about 2 million Topix pages indexed on the .net TLD and about 1.2 million on the .com TLD.
So six months ago, had you asked any SEO "expert" about what to do, almost no one would have suggested the present course. But has it hurt anything? Maybe, maybe not. Topix.com has a PR6 home page with about 1.2 million inbound links, while Topix.net has a PR8 home page with almost 7.4 million inbound links. So at this point, in terms of raw accumulated power, consolidating those domains would create one very powerful site.
But would that be better than the current situation? Perhaps not. What about that "unpredictability" the WSJ (and zillions of SEOs) talk about with dupe domains? That even in the best case, Google will pick one page or the other at its own discretion -- and it might not be the one you want? Consider the SERP for [detroit local news]:
A page from Topix.net shows up in spot 8, and a page from Topix.com -- an exact mirror of the .net page -- comes in at spot 9. Not exactly Google choosing one over the other.
But if the pages are identical, why do they have different titles on the SERP? Because Topix.com is heavily linked to from DMOZ, and the .com page shown in this screen shot shows the title used on the Detroit News and Media category of DMOZ. This leads to a question: When Google pulls one page's title and/or meta description from DMOZ, does that override the duplication filter?
Detroit's hardly alone here. Do some searches yourself with a city name and "news" or "local news" and see for yourself.
There's really no moral to this story, other than every time something like this happens, the "guidelines" from engines lose more and more bite. I'm happy that (at least according to my superficial research) Topix is doing well; it's a great idea, smartly executed. But these SERPs are yet another frustrating case of mixed signals from engines.
In my opinion, in a case like this, once Topix owned the .com version, that was all that needed to happen. I don't think the .com even needed to have any content for the problem to be solved. Looking back, my advice would have been to keep all content on Topix.net and immediately set up a 301 from Topix.com to Topix.net -- the exact opposite direction that most people recommended. That way, the authority of Topix.net content would never have been in jeopardy, and any links that mistakenly found their way to Topix.com would immediately transfer link popularity (as well as the user) back to the main (.net) site. They could have even promoted the site as "Topix.com" with no major headaches. Almost no one would care (or even notice) if they were redirected, whether it was type-in traffic or someone that clicked over from a news story.
see all posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at September 24, 2007 03:14 AM
Intrapromote: [ Case studies | SEO services | Bios ]
Trackback Pings
To TrackBack this entry, use the following URL:
http://seoblog.intrapromote.com/mt-tb.cgi/446