One of our international readers sent in this question via email:
Yesterday a friend bought a bunch of domains and offered one to me that he bought as a gift. I’m not sure whether I should use it. My blog is at newbluewidgets.blogspot.com and is currently at PR5 (3,800 backlinks in Y!). He bought www.newbluewidgets.com. What could go wrong if I moved my site to the new domain?
Consider the cons:
- It would be hard to recreate your newbluewidgets.blogspot.com’s link profile overnight. Most of the backlinks you have are natural links from trusted sites.
- By moving to a new domain, you risk being caught in the TrustBox.
- I don’t think you can safely do a server-side 301 redirect on a Blogspot-hosted site.
- There are ten other reasons for switching courtesy of Nick Wilson of Performancing.com.
But in the end these are secondary considerations. Since blogging is your business, it’s imperative that you get a standalone domain for purely branding-related reasons. The branding advantages of having a separate domain far outweigh the temporary setback in SE rankings. With a cleverly crafted “we’re moving” email to your loyal readers, the transfer won’t be as painful. Besides being the problogger that you are, I’m sure you’ll get those 3,800 natural links in no time :)